LABIDEM · Language birth and language death in a multicultural Context: The Case of Coptic

Final Activity Report Summary - LABIDEM (Language Birth and Language Death in a Multicultural Context: The Case of Coptic)

This project focussed on the social history of the Coptic language from the fourth century CE, when it started being used as a vehicle of communication on a large scale, appearing also in written form, to the eleventh century, by when its role as a medium of social communication gave way to Arabic. The aim of the project was to understand the role Coptic played over the centuries in Christian Egyptian society, the values it stood for, the forms of identity associated with it and the reasons for both its emergence and its disappearance. Coptic offered the rare case of a language whose entire life-span was contained within less than a millennium, from the late Roman Empire to the time of the Crusades. Contrary to most languages of that period, all of which are known to us through solely formal written sources, Coptic had the enormous advantage of being one of the languages found on papyri, a source that gave scholars access to a much wider range of linguistic registers, and thus the opportunity to observe closely the linguistic choices made by different social groups in various social situations. The research which was conducted demonstrated inflections in the social role of Coptic and in its interaction with the languages with which it was in contact. % The development of Coptic in the fourth century was concomitant with that of other local languages within the Roman Empire and seemed to reflect a reaction against the increasing centralisation of the state. It was also helped by the efforts towards Christianisation, which involved the translation of scripture, liturgical texts and important homiletic works into the local languages. At that time it still seemed to be seen as the language of the illiterate peasantry, because Greek had entirely dominated the written word for a couple of centuries. The prestige of Coptic began to rise through its association with the new-born monastic movement, which adopted it allegedly because of its simplicity and lack of sophistication. By the sixth century, Coptic evolved into a language that city elites not only were ready to admit they knew, but also used in their private correspondence and even in some legal transactions. It transcended the monastic world, becoming a language of public life alongside Greek. Until the Arab conquest in the middle of the seventh century, Egypt went through a period of balanced societal bilingualism. The situation was reversed with the arrival of a third language, Arabic. Local languages, including Coptic, responded to Arabic in a very different way than they had to Greek, almost a millennium earlier, when it arrived through the conquests of Alexander the Great and their aftermath. Even though Greek was widely spoken even in remote areas it was identified, until at least the fourth century, as the language of culture and had strong connotations of social hierarchy. Arabic, by contrast, reached down to the lowest strata of local society. One of the probable reasons for this phenomenon was that Greek retained its prestige and continued to be used in the administration, so that Arabic was for a time mainly the language of the army. Several complex reasons were combined to give it the overwhelming place it took in the Near East in general, and in Egypt more than anywhere else, since it became the sole spoken language from the eleventh century onwards, and probably even earlier in some areas. The most important turning point that I was able to identify was the arrival of the Fatimid dynasty in the late tenth century. This transformed Egypt into the centre of a new empire rather than what it was under the Caliphate and, before that, under the Roman Empire, namely a frontier province whose fertility was exploited to the maximum. The symbolic and economic implications of this change were enormous, for it provided the country with the status of a self-standing, prestigious and prosperous political entity.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union