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He personally walked the streets of Cairo and eavesdropped on Coptic-speaking homes to find out if any family was speaking Coptic. [ 13 ] [ 14 ] As a written language, Coptic is thought to have completely given way to Arabic around the 13th century, [ 15 ] though it seems to have survived as a spoken language until the 17th century [ 2 ] and in ...
While Coptic Christians speak the same dialects and are ... [125] who are extremely successful businessmen and one of the world's 100 wealthiest people, are ...
Coptic Christians lost their majority status in Egypt after the 14th century and the spread of Islam in the entirety of North Africa. Today, Copts form a major ethno-religious group whose origins date back to the Ancient Egyptians. [4] The Coptic Christian population in Egypt is the largest Christian community in the Middle East. [5]
Coptic Americans (Coptic: ⲛⲓⲣⲉⲙⲛⲭⲏⲙⲓ ⲛ̀ⲁⲙⲉⲣⲓⲕⲏ, romanized: niremenkāmi enamerika) are American citizens of Coptic descent or persons of Coptic descent residing in the United States. As of 2018, there were some 500,000 Copts living in the United States.
A number of Coptic business and land-owning families became very wealthy and influential such as the Egyptian Coptic Christian Sawiris family [13] that owns the Orascom conglomerate, spanning telecommunications, construction, tourism, industries and technology. [14] [15] In 2008, Forbes estimated the family's net worth at $36 billion.
Many of the hymns in the liturgy are in Coptic and have been passed down for many centuries. The language is used to preserve Egypt's original language, which was banned by the Arab invaders, who ordered Arabic to be used instead. [17] However, most Copts speak Arabic, the official language of Egypt. [16]
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [2] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
The biggest Coptic community abroad, that of the United States, included up to 1,000,000 persons in the late 2010s according to Coptic advocacy groups, but only 300,000 according to the Coptic Orthodox Church in the United States itself, and even less—roughly between 100,000 and 200,000—according to the scarce statistical evidence supplied ...