What do modern egyptians speak

Arabic is mainly spoken in religious contexts in Egypt today. The language is associated with traditional Islamic texts. Sudanese Arabic is also popular among the languages spoken in Egypt. It is spoken by 1.

Sudanese Arabic is most prevalent among Sudanese immigrants, and it is linguistically distinct from Egyptian Arabic. Egypt is home to the largest number of Sudanese immigrants and refugees than any other African country.

Years of civil war in Sudan has caused many Sudanese nationals to migrate in the country. These immigrants who widely speak Sudanese Arabic have facilitated the spread of the language in the country. The Domari language is spoken by Muslim Gypsies in Egypt and boasts 0. At a prevalence of 0. Ancient Egyptians developed the Hieroglyphic language, which indicated words and ideas and was used in temples and tombs.

It was then simplified by temple scribes to form Hieratic, and finally Demotic was devised as normal people could not write both forms. When the Ptolemaic Kingdom invaded Egypt, the Greek language, whose letters had their origin in the Egyptian Hieroglyphic script, influenced the ancient Egyptian language and was spread all over Egypt. With the wide spreading of Christianity in the late second century, especially in Upper Egypt where most people could only speak Demotic and not Greek, the evangelism was in the Demotic form of the Egyptian language.

Hence, the divine books were read in Greek and translated orally into the Egyptian language, but the translation was not written due to the difficulty of Demotic and its signs, which had many pagan symbols.

When evangelists felt obliged to write the translation of divine books, they replaced the pagan symbols with Greek letters representing the same sounds, with only seven letters from Demotic for sounds that did not have equivalents in Greek, forming the language known as Coptic. Parts of the Bible were then translated from Greek to Coptic in the first part of the third century, but the other parts were translated in the fourth century.

Its main dialects are Sahidic, Bohairic and Fayumic, which could be known through reading Coptic texts, as Coptic is the only form of the ancient Egyptian language that has vowels indicating the pronunciation of words. They extend from dialects of the ancient Egyptian language that differed according to where it was used. Egypt is far from monolingual or monocultural and in fact, has a rich linguistic history stretching back thousands of years before the arrival of Arabic culture.

The most widely spoken and common language in Egypt is, broadly speaking, Egyptian Arabic. Egyptian Arabic is a broad term that covers many sub and regional vernaculars depending on geographical location. Each sub-dialect is a product of centuries of local and foreign influences. Prior to Arabic arriving in Egypt in the 7th Century due to the spread of Islam, Egyptians spoke Coptic now mostly extinct apart from Coptic Orthodox religious liturgy.