Khai and the Difference Between Sahidic and Bohairic

Coptic was written in several dialects and two of them matter most. Sahidic, associated with the Nile valley of Upper Egypt, became the dominant literary form through the first Christian millennium, and most of the classic Coptic corpus survives in it, including the Nag Hammadi codices, the great monastic writings and the bulk of the early biblical translations.

Bohairic, of the Delta, rose later and became the language of the Coptic Orthodox Church, which it remains. The two differ in vocabulary, in grammar and above all in the vowels, and khai is one of the plainest differences at the level of the alphabet itself. The relationship between the dialects and how far each reflects a genuinely regional spoken form as against a scribal tradition is a question on which specialists differ, and the evidence is uneven in ways that make it hard to settle, since some dialects are known from very few manuscripts and the place a manuscript was found is not necessarily where its text was composed. What follows for a reader is practical. A statement about Coptic that does not say which dialect it describes is often wrong for one of them. The alphabet is thirty two letters or thirty one letters; a given word takes one vowel or another; a sound is reconstructed or is heard in church this Sunday. Khai is where that distinction is easiest to see.