Coptic

Coptic is the final stage of ancient Egyptian, spoken in Egypt from the third century AD and written in Greek letters supplemented by seven Demotic signs. Sahidic became the literary standard around 325–800, carrying Bible translations and Gnostic codices at Nag Hammadi. Bohairic displaced it as the Coptic Church's liturgical tongue from the ninth century.

After the Arab conquest of the 640s, the caliph Abd al-Malik imposed Arabic as the sole administrative language around 700. Coptic remained village speech until the tenth century, when persecution ordered by the caliph al-Hakim drove it out of schools, streets and homes.

The last known Coptic literary work was composed in the late 1300s; the language survived as a minority spoken tongue into the 1600s, lingering longer in Upper Egyptian hamlets. It lived on in Coptic Orthodox Bohairic liturgy and left a substratum in Egyptian Arabic vocabulary and grammar.