Over the past few decades, multilingualism has been attracting increasing attention from society, linguists and historians alike. Its resonance in our societies is rooted in various macro-social causes : mass emigration has made us ever more attentive to the problems of cultural and linguistic coexistence ; the expansion of schooling has led us to take an interest in the acquisition of non-native languages, as well as in the problems of learning national languages among the children of immigrants ; finally, the development of information and communication technologies has created the conditions for virtual multiculturalism, and poses the problem of adapting certain languages and scripts to these new technologies in a context of globalization.
These new challenges have led to an intensification of linguistic reflection, with the development of the study of languages in contact and multilingualism. This new field, which has been developing since the 1950s, has accelerated sharply since the end of the 20th century. One of the consequences has been a reappraisal of the phenomenon of multilingualism, which had previously been seen as having harmful consequences for the development of the individual confronted with it. This new perspective has greatly enriched the problematic, contributing to the creation of a multidisciplinary field combining linguistics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics.
All these recent developments were bound to have an impact on historians' questions, particularly in the field of antiquity. After research had massively scrutinized the phenomenon ofliteracy, the partially corollary phenomenon of multilingualism took on increasing importance. It is perhaps in the field of papyrology that it has found its most fertile ground for study. Egyptian society from the Ptolemaic to the Arab periods was profoundly multilingual. So it's easy to understand why, especially in recent decades, specialists in Egyptian history have been increasingly tempted to learn languages other than their own, in order to gain first-hand knowledge of the sources that are indispensable for a more complete picture. For anyone working on Egypt, before being an object of study, multilingualism must be a state of mind, a method.
Despite the large number of studies on the question of multilingualism in Egypt, the work of source analysis and reflection is far from complete ; there has been no systematic treatment of the problem in its entirety.
It was all the more necessary to inaugurate this new chair on the written culture of Late Antiquity as multilingualism conditions documentation, generating interference phenomena and creating processes of language specialization. Insofar as these processes inform the writing of texts, the study of multilingualism must be a prerequisite for their historical exploitation. Moreover, multilingualism in Egypt acquires a new dimension in Late Antiquity and the early Arab period(4th-8thc. ), with the appearance of Coptic, Pehlevi and Arabic, and the reactivation of Latin.
