African
Roots of the Egyptian Language
The Egyptian language was spoken and written as early as the
fourth millennium B.C. It was gradually replaced
by Arabic after the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century
A.D. The last known speakers of Egyptian lived
in the eighteenth century A.D. It belonged to
the Afro-Asiatic language family, which is still found today
in Africa and the Middle East. (A language family is a group
of languages that share basic vocabulary roots and grammatical
structures. English, for example, is in the Indo-European language
family and is closely related to German and Dutch.)
Modern Afro-Asiatic languages include Arabic, Hebrew, the Berber
languages of Morocco, the
Kushite languages of Sudan,
and the Hausa languages used in Chad
and Nigeria. |
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