The Kellis texts reaffirm even more clearly the division of Greek and Coptic according to documentary domains: Coptic was used exclusively for private letters, while Greek was the exclusive language of legal or administrative documents. In addition, a link between women and the use of Coptic emerges, which may be due to the fact that Greek was the language of the public sphere, while Coptic was the language of the private sphere, of the family domain, but also to the conditions of schooling (and therefore access to the Greek language) that were clearly unfavorable to women.
This collection of documents is the first to show that, by the middle of the 4thcentury , Coptic had become well acclimatized among the lay population and was widely used even in the most remote areas of Egypt, and that it was spoken by bilinguals. The form of the letters also bears the deep mark of this bilingualism through a hybrid diplomacy, casting Coptic content in a Greek mold to which it is easily accepted to submit.
After the oases and non-directly monastic circles, the last4th-century collection is that of the archives of the anchorite Apa John (Lycopolite, c. 375-400), which so far comprise 34 papyri, all letters (14 in Greek and 20 in Coptic), addressed mainly by monks, clerics, soldiers, civil servants and private individuals to a certain Apa Jean (a figure known from Palladius'Histoire lausiaque and the Enquête sur les moines d'Égypte), asking him to pray for them or intercede on their behalf with the authorities.
This is the first time that a file containing Coptic texts has come from such a wide range of social backgrounds. However, the coptographers are above all monks, testifying to the increasingly univocal relationship between Coptic and monasticism. It's also the first dossier in which those involved have little or no command of Greek, starting with the protagonist, Apa Jean, who is unable to sign in Greek: the use of Coptic is therefore clearly conditioned by the linguistic deficiencies of the editors.
