Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Coptic is the youngest written standard of the Egyptian language. Spelled with the characters of the Greek alphabet plus some extra signs, it was productively used for almost a thousand years, from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries CE, to record texts of a wide range of types and purposes, and is still being used in the liturgy of the Coptic church. Coptic texts have survived in enormous numbers and comprise literary, semi-literary, and documentary corpora in a range of dialects and genres. Analysis of salient grammatical features of the Coptic language elucidates both innovative and conservative features in comparison to those of its predecessor, Demotic.