Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

In scholarship there is no consensus on how to define a dialect, especially since the concept of “dialect” is a modern one, carrying with it political implications. Indeed it can be demonstrated that, historically, local idioms have sometimes gained national status for reasons relating to politics and culture. The existence of different dialects in pre-Coptic Egypt was discerned early in Egyptology, in the late nineteenth century, and is today accepted with only occasional skepticism. The identification and analysis of dialects is problematic for the Egyptologist for several reasons, among them the constraints of the hieroglyphic script, which was phonologically unspecific; the geographically unbalanced nature of the surviving corpus of texts; and the often elusive determination of textual provenance. Dialects have left written traces, however, in all areas of Egyptian—phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon—such that the standard view of a linear succession of five well-ordered language states (Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic) can no longer be maintained.