Diagram representing the historical language shift from Coptic to Arabic and the path along which the process of Coptic language restoration and expansion must follow
Many speak of Coptic as a dead language either because it is not spoken anymore by its native population, that is the Copts, on their daily lives, or because it has ceased to be passed from one generation to the next. But the least that could be said about this clinical, cruel judgement that it is technical and unfair. Coptic, unlike tribal languages that have been lost forever, and have become deadly dead for various reasons, possesses a script and a rich literature; is well documented and recorded; has several natives who still read and speak in it, with various degrees of fluency; retains many who are proud of it and consider it as sacred, working actively to revitalise it; and, perhaps most importantly, still lives in the religious domain: in churches up and down Egypt, and in all Coptic churches in the diaspora, Coptic is still used in reading scripture, saying prayers and singing hymns.
I do not, therefore, see the language shift that has affected Coptic as complete, ending in death, but as a pressure effect from the outside, squeezing and reducing its fields of action, thereby making it retreat from public life, work and trade, education and the home fronts, and withdraw to the centre – to the ecclesiastical domain where it held its ground with such tenacity thanks to the Coptic Church.
Seeing the process of language shift from Coptic to Arabic in this way and in this direction from periphery to centre will help us to reverse it by expanding Coptic from the centre to the peripheries – by gradually pushing it out from the religious domain to the home domain, education, work and trade, the media, and eventually our public life. In this way, revival of the Coptic language is seen not as a resurrection from the death, but as a restoration – an expansion and reoccupation of lost domains that are vital for any strong and healthy language.
I have tried to represent this in the above diagram which shows the historical language shift from Coptic to Arabic in the horizontal chevron list, and the hoped process of restoration and expansion in the reverted chevron list.