Bohairic Coptic

Bohairic is the dialect of the Nile Delta, and it displaced Sahidic as the literary standard of Coptic from around the eleventh century, by which time the patriarchate had moved north. It is the dialect in which the Coptic Orthodox Church still conducts its liturgy, so Bohairic is the one form of the Egyptian language that has never stopped being used out loud, in an unbroken line running back through Demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian to the third millennium BCE.

O. H. E. Burmester's detailed description of the liturgical services sets out where the language actually stands within a service. The three anaphoras in ordinary use, of Saint Basil, of Saint Gregory the Theologian and of Saint Cyril, are Bohairic, as are the hymns of the Coptic psalmody and the responses the congregation sings, while the readings and much of the preaching are in Arabic, which has been the spoken language of Egyptian Christians for a thousand years.

The result is a service conducted in two languages at once, with congregations following Bohairic that they may not otherwise speak, supported by printed texts that set the Coptic and the Arabic side by side. The pronunciation of Coptic itself became a controversy in the nineteenth century, when a reformed system based on modern Greek values was introduced and largely replaced the older Egyptian pronunciation, and both are still defended by people who use them.

Whether Coptic survived as a spoken language into the modern period, and where, is genuinely disputed. Reports of villages in Upper Egypt still speaking it in the seventeenth century exist and are hard to evaluate, and there is no unbroken line of ordinary speech that can be demonstrated from the evidence available.

What is clear is the deliberate revival. From the later nineteenth century, and associated above all with Iqladiyus Labib, Coptic was taught in schools, printed in primers and used at home by families who chose to raise children in it, and the effort has continued through Sunday schools and church institutes into the present. Otto Meinardus's history of the church places that revival within the wider renewal that also produced the modern Coptic monastic revival and the church's expansion abroad.

Bohairic is therefore not quite a dead language and not quite a living one. It has a continuous liturgical use, an active teaching tradition, a modern printed and now digital life, and a small number of people who use it conversationally by choice. The atlas records it as a liturgical language with a revival movement attached, rather than as either extinct or vernacular, because the evidence supports that description and not a simpler one.