Late antique egypt as an observatory of multilinguism and empire: an overview

• Autores: Arietta Papaconstantinou
• Localización: Antiquité tardive: revue internationale d'histoire et d'archéologie, ISSN 1250-7334, Nº. 32, 2024 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Langues, langages et communication dans le monde tardo-antique), págs. 49-66
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article offers a broad overview of research on multilingualism in Egypt, focusing more specifically on the languages that have interacted with Egyptian in its late antique form, known as Coptic. These interactions took place in an imperial framework that changed over time, both in the empire it was based on (Roman, east Roman, Caliphate) and in its internal linguistic make-up (the eastern Roman empire, for instance, being less and less Latin-centred). That changing landscape had repercussions on the indigenous language, a phenomenon for which Egypt is an excellent observatory because of its invaluable papyri, a source capturing a much larger range of linguistic registers than any other for the period.