The situation throughout the Empire : legal sources and Near Eastern papyri (end)
Some have seen in the legal use of Aramaic dialects a survival of a tradition predating the Roman occupation, which could be corroborated by the disappearance of contracts in vernacular languages after the middle of the 3rdcentury . But this position has been challenged by eminent scholars who have emphasized the vitality of legal practice in Aramaic despite the vagaries of our documentation. Proof of the visibility of these vernacular languages well beyond the 3rdcentury can be seen in the monumental Syriac inscriptions which, from the 4thcentury onwards, took over the public space (in contrast to what was happening in Egypt), or the Syriac subscriptions affixed by certain bishops to official documents of the ecumenical councils of the5th-6thcenturies , even though Coptic was never used there. Unlike the local languages of other provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, Coptic was not officially recognized for the first three centuries of its history. As a result, in linguistic terms, Egypt was, if not an anomaly, at least an exception
The obstacle of multidialectalism
One of the reasons for this marginal position may be inherent in the Coptic language itself. Its multidialectalism may indeed explain its slowness to compete with Greek, the common language(koinè) of all Hellenic-speaking areas, despite the development of " supra-dialects ". But even these are artificial languages, out of step with the languages spoken in everyday life. Artifice for artifice, Greek could be used as a second-best solution: even if it meant resorting to a language not used naturally in the drafting of regulated documents, Greek would do the job just fine.
