Languages of Egypt
| Languages of Egypt | |
|---|---|
| Official | Literary Arabic |
| Vernacular | Egyptian Arabic (68%) (de facto lingua franca) |
| Minority | Sa'idi Arabic (29%), Bedouin Arabic (1.6%), Sudanese Arabic (0.6%), Domari (0.3%), Nobiin (0.3%), Bedawi (0.1%), Siwi, other |
| Immigrant | Greek, Armenian, Italian |
| Foreign | English, French and German |
| Historical language(s) | Egyptian and its Coptic descendant |
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There are a number of languages spoken in Egypt, but Egyptian Arabic is by far the most widely spoken in the country.
Official language
The official language of Egypt is the literary Arabic and is used in most written media. Egyptian Arabic is the commonly spoken language, and is occasionally written in Arabic script or Latin script. English, French, and German[citation needed] are also widely spoken and used in business and educated circles.
Arabic languages
Arabic came to Egypt in the 7th century, and Egyptian Arabic has become the modern spoken language of the Egyptians. Of the many varieties of Arabic, Egyptian Arabic is the most widely understood first dialect in the Middle East-North Africa, probably due to the influence of Egyptian cinema throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
A Bedouin Arab minority speaks a variety of Bedouin Arabic mostly in the Sinai Peninsula. Sudanese Arabic is also spoken by the Sudanese minority.
Nubian languages
In the Upper Nile Valley, around Kom Ombo and Aswan, there are about 300,000 speakers of Nubian languages, mainly Nobiin, but also Kenuzi-Dongola.
Historical languages
Other Egyptian languages (also known as Copto-Egyptian) consist of ancient Egyptian and Coptic, and form a separate branch among the family of Afro-Asiatic languages. The Egyptian language is among the first written languages, and is known from hieroglyphic inscriptions preserved on monuments and sheets of papyrus. The Coptic language, the only extant descendant of Egyptian, is today the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
The "Koiné" dialect of the Greek language was important in Hellenistic Alexandria, and was used in the philosophy and science of that culture, and was also studied by later Arabic scholars.
Other languages of Egypt
Approximately 77,000 speakers of Beja live in the Eastern Desert and along the coast of the Red Sea.
Some 234,000 (2004) Dom speak the Domari language (an Indo-Aryan language related to Romany) and are concentrated north of Cairo and in Luxor.
About 15,000 Egyptian Berbers living in the Siwa oasis and its surroundings speak Siwi Berber,[1] which is a variety of the Berber language of North Africa. Siwi Berber is well mutually intelligible with Libyan Berber dialects. In ancient times, the population of western Egypt was probably made of Berber-speaking tribes.
External links
References
- ^ Siwi (siwi or žlan n isiwan) is a Berber language spoken at the oasis of Siwa in western Egypt (Matrūħ Province), about 500 km west of the Nile and 250 km south of the Mediterranean coast, by a little less than 15,000 people, forming a majority of the oasis' population. The nearest Egyptian oasis, Bahariyya, is some 350 km east of Siwa. Siwi is also spoken at the tiny oasis of Gāra near Siwa, and I was told of a multigenerational Siwi community at nearby Jaghbūb in Libya. page 16 of the book GRAMMATICAL CONTACT IN THE SAHARA: Arabic, Berber, and Songhay in Tabelbala and Siwa, August 2010, by: Lameen Souag. [1]
| Official language | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken Arabic dialects | ||
| Historical languages | ||
| Minority languages | ||
| Foreign languages | ||
| Immigrant minority languages | ||
| Sign languages | ||
