The Greek-speaking Church : liturgy
In addition to being the language of the state, Greek was also the language of the Church of Egypt from its origins until well after the Arab-Muslim conquest. What impact did this monolingualism of the Church have on the language used by the faithful in the more ordinary context of the liturgy ?
Dating from the end of the 3rd to the 9thcentury , this documentation includes three types of texts in particular (prayers, hymns and acclamations), which confirm the monopoly of Greek in the liturgy, even if there are some advances in Coptic, depending on the nature of the texts. Prayers were the first to give way to Coptic, from the 6th/17thcentury onwards, coinciding with a period of literary flowering for the language. Examination of a file of prayers from the monastery of Apollô d'al-Balā'iza near Asyut (6th/7thc. ) shows that liturgical celebrations were held in both languages, used concomitantly, - a bilingualism that contrasts with the quasi-monolingualism (Coptic) of the rest of the documentation from this monastery -, and leads us to question the criterion for the distribution of languages. As for the hymns (sung parts) and, even more so, the acclamations (codified dialogues between the various participants in the liturgy), they resisted the penetration of Coptic at least until the 8th-9thcenturies . This is most likely due to the fact that these are the most formal parts of the liturgy, for which the " High Language ", the language of prestige, was felt obliged to be used, despite the natural linguistic evolution of society.
