Egyptian language
| Egyptian | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Region | Originally, throughout Ancient Egypt and parts of Nubia (especially during the times of the Nubian kingdoms) | ||||||
| Ethnicity | Ancient Egyptians | ||||||
| Era | Late fourth millennium BC – 19th century AD (with the extinction of Coptic); still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Churches | ||||||
Afro-Asiatic
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| Dialects |
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| Hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic and Coptic (later, occasionally, Arabic script in government translations and Latin script in scholars' transliterations and several hieroglyphic dictionaries) | |||||||
| Language codes | |||||||
| ISO 639-2 | egy (also cop for Coptic) | ||||||
| ISO 639-3 | egy (also cop for Coptic) | ||||||
| Glottolog | egyp1246 | ||||||
| Linguasphere | 11-AAA-a | ||||||
The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian (r n kmt; 'speech of Egypt'), is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century.
Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages, first recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC. It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4,000 years. Its classical form, known as "Middle Egyptian," served as the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period.
By the time of classical antiquity, the spoken language had evolved into Demotic, and by the Roman era, diversified into various Coptic dialects. These were eventually supplanted by Arabic after the Muslim conquest of Egypt, although Bohairic Coptic remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.