The language spoken in ancient Egypt was a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The earliest known complete written sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BCE, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known, along with Sumerian.[3]
Egyptian was spoken until the late seventeenth century in the form of Coptic. The national language of modern Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Coptic as the language of daily life in the centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt.[1]
Coptic is still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It has several hundred fluent speakers today.[4]
