Arabic began to appear in official documents from the eighth century and it soon became an official language along with Coptic and Greek, although the number of Arabs was small compared to the number of Copts: 80,000 to 8 million, respectively. Egypt was a polyglot country, with a diverse population made up of rural peasantry, city-dwellers who lived on the fringes of the arable land around the Delta and in the deserts. The Nile Valley and Delta areas were densely populated with a Coptic-speaking population, and the cities were inhabited by Greek merchants and urban Copts. Coptic was the spoken language of the majority for a long time after the Islamic conquest in AD 639–42 (Holes 1995: 18). The spread of immigration into Egypt from Arabia, and the conversion to Islam of several Copts in order to escape the poll tax, favoured the spread of the Arabic language as part of the overall process of Arabisation and Islamisation (Holes 1995: 24–5).

The modernisation process in nineteenth-century Egypt, led by the Turkish ruler Mohammed Ali, called for further up-grading of the language; in his efforts to improve military education, Mohammed Ali ordered the translation of teaching materials into Arabic, including foreign-language books which could be used for educating his soldiers (Haeri 1997: 801). This process continued and included a closer look at the spoken vernacular; although it marked the beginning of improved education possibilities for the masses (ibid. p. 801), it simultaneously caused a decline in the role of religious schools, based upon teaching the Qur'an in classical Arabic. Arabic was declared the sole official language in Egypt in 1863, thereby eroding the status of the Turkish language. Other languages, however, such as English, Greek and French, were still used in all professions and with the British conquest in 1882, Arabic ‘suffered another reverse, when English was declared the sole official language in 1898’ (Holes 1995: 36). Classical Arabic was considered ‘the linguistic jewel in the Islamic cultural patrimony. It is regarded as the inimitable apogee of perfection, unsurpassable in beauty, an ethereal ideal of eloquence, perfect symmetry and succinctness – however imperfectly, in practice, many Arabs understand it’ (Holes 1995: 4).