Egyptian Language

Egyptian Language, language of Egypt from ancient times until about the 14th century ad. The sole member of the Egyptian subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian has a longer recorded history—almost 5,000 years—than any other language.

As in other Afro-Asiatic languages, words in Egyptian tend to be formed from roots typically consisting of three consonants; the basic meaning of the root is altered by different vowel patterns. Egyptian verbs, however, developed forms and syntax that vary markedly from verbs in the other Afro-Asiatic subfamilies. Spoken and literary Egyptian differs considerably. Most of the formal inscriptions on tombs, temples, pillars, and statues were written in an archaic style, and approximations of living speech are preserved only in practical documents such as business records and letters.

On the basis of the prevailing literary language, Egyptian has been divided into five periods. Old Egyptian was spoken from before 3000 bc until about 2200 bc. Middle Egyptian, dominant from about 2200 bc to about 1300 bc, is considered the classical Egyptian literary language. Its period of dominance roughly coincides with Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (2040 bc-1640 bc) and the transitional periods before and afterward. Middle Egyptian persisted until about 500 bc as a dead literary language (written, not spoken, as Latin was in Europe centuries later). Early in the New Kingdom (1550 bc-1070 bc), the pharaoh Akhenaton introduced Late Egyptian as the new literary standard. It shows marked grammatical and phonetic changes from the earlier language. In about 700 bc demotic Egyptian (meaning “popular Egyptian”) became the accepted literary language. It was written with a distinctive script called demotic script. The emergence of the Coptic language in the early 2nd century ad marked the last phase of Egyptian. Coptic coincides both with the replacement of traditional Egyptian writing by an adaptation of the Greek alphabet and with the rise of a Christian literature. After about ad 700 Coptic began to give way to the Arabic language, and the use of Coptic declined rapidly from the 11th to 14th centuries. However, it is still the liturgical language of the Coptic church.

Three forms of writing were developed by the Egyptians: hieroglyphs (used for formal inscriptions) and two cursive offshoots, hieratic (up to about 700 bc) and demotic (about 700 bc-about ad 450). For all three, the signs represented ideograms, syllables (consonants only), single letters, and determinatives (interpretive aids for signs having more than one meaning). The writing did not represent vowels, and thus (except for Coptic) scholars can trace the phonetic evolution of the language only through the consonants.