Linguistic Variation in Ancient Egyptian

This chapter provides an overview of the types of linguistic variation attested in pre-demotic Egyptian. More specifically, a sociolinguistic perspective is adopted in order to describe the impact that extralinguistic factors—such as time, origin, and social status of the scribe, situation of communication—may have on the written performance at the time. It is observed that the dimensions of variation related to the scribes, while not entirely absent, are rather elusive in this corpus. Variation resulting from the contexts of communication, conversely, is significant: within a multifaceted scribal repertoire, each genre imposes the selection of specific linguistic registers, which range from greater vernacularity and variation to greater formality and standardization. In a final section, the community of Deir el-Medina, namely the settlement of (royal) tomb-builders during the New Kingdom, is in focus so as to describe the effects that this particular scribal environment had on the written production.