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Revival, and a Language Between Liturgy and Home

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Revival, and a Language Between Liturgy and Home

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.

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