Introduction
Records of the Ancient Egyptian language have been dated to 4200 B.C. It is part of the Afro-Asiatic group of languages and is related to Hamitic (North African languages) and Semitic (such as Arabic and Hebrew) language groups. The language survives today in the Coptic language used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church and, increasingly, as the mother tongue of many Copts in Egypt and in the diaspora. Thus, the lifespan of the Egyptian language makes it the oldest recorded language known to modern man.

Development of the Egyptian Language
No language can last thousands of years without undergoing changes. These changes can be brought about by brute force, can be made to make the language easier and for many other reasons. Egyptian was no different and scholars group the Egyptian language into 5 major divisions:
1. Old Egyptian:
The language of Dynasties I-VIII, about 4200 to 2240 B.C. This may be taken to include the language of the Pyramid Texts. Otherwise, the surviving documents of this stage are mainly official or otherwise formal-funerary formulae and tomb-inscriptions, including some biographical texts. Old Egyptian passes with but little modification into Middle Egyptian.
2. Middle Egyptian:
Middle Egyptian, possibly the vernacular of Dynasties IX-XI about 2240-1990 B.C., was later contaminated with new popular elements. In the later form it survived for some monumental and literary purposes right down to Graeco-Roman times, while the earlier form was retained as the religious language.
3. Late Egyptian:
The vernacular of Dynasties XVIII-XXIV about 1573-715 B.C. exhibited chiefly in business documents and letters, but also in stories and other literary compositions, and to some extent also in the official monuments from Dyn. XIX onwards. There are few texts however wherein the vernacular shows itself unmixed with the 'classical' idiom of Middle Egyptian.
4. Demotic:
T his term is loosely applied to the language used in the books and documents written in the script known as Demotic from Dyn. XXV to late Roman times (715 B.C. to 470 A.D.) Here again the old 'classical' idiom is blended with later, vernacular elements, often inextricably.
5. Coptic:
The old Egyptian language in its latest developments, as written in the Coptic script, from the end of the first century A.D. onwards; so called because it was spoken by the Copts, the Christian descendants of the Ancient Egyptians. After the Arab conquest (641 A.D.) Coptic was gradually superseded by Arabic, and became almost extinct as a spoken tongue in the sixteenth century. Coptic is written in the Greek Alphabet supplemented by seven special characters derived ultimately from the hieroglyphs. Coptic has experienced a great renaissance over the last century.

The Ancient Egyptian Language
Egyptian is a fairly typical Afro-Asiatic language. At the heart of Egyptian vocabulary was a root of three consonants. Sometimes there were only two, for example "rA" (sun); and some could be as large as five "sxdxd" (be upside-down). Vowels and other consonants were then added to this root in order to derive words. However, we do not know what these vowels would have been, since like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian does not write vowels; hence "ankh" could represent either "life", "to live" or "living". In transcription, /a/, /i/ and /u/ all represent consonants; for example, the name Tutankhamen was written in Egyptian /twt 'nkh ymn/ (the apostrophe represents a glottal stop). Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values in order to make the words pronounceable.
Egyptian's basic word order is Verb Subject Object; where English-speakers would write "the man opens the door", Egyptians would say "opens the man the door". The early stages of Egyptian possessed no articles, no words for "the" or "a"; later forms used the words /pA/, /tA/ and /nA/ for this purpose. Egyptian uses two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, similarly to French and Irish Gaelic; it also uses three grammatical numbers: like most other Afro-Asiatic languages, it contrasts singular, dual and plural forms. When saying something like "the man is red", the word "red" (dSrt in Egyptian) acts as a predicative verb.
Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted bilabial, labiodental, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal and glottal consonants, in a distribution rather similar to that of Arabic.

The Ancient Egyptian Script
The Ancient Egyptians devised a writing system to record their spoken language over 60 centuries ago. The first application seems to have been the calendar. The system started by giving each word a symbol, called a hieroglyph. Most people refer to the hieroglyphs when they speak about Egyptian writing. A hieroglyph is a picture of a real object, but hieroglyphs can be used in three distinct ways: as what they represent, as a concept related to what they represent or as the sound of the word they represent. For example, a picture of the sun may be taken to be the sun itself, light or heat (because the sun is both a luminary body and provides heat) or as the sound "sun". The later stages of Egyptian (Middle and Late) use hieroglyphs almost solely in the third usage, while Demotic and Coptic completely abandoned the use of hieroglyphs. This convention was of course doomed because of the tremendous vocabulary it would have generated. Out of such ideas they took some of these hieroglyphs and associated a sound value to them which, when combined together, would spell out the spoken word. The sound values of such characters depended mostly on the pronunciation of the word that it denoted in the early stage. Thus the hieroglyph for mouth, pronounced 'ro' became the sound 'r' in the new system. About 130 hieroglyphs have been identified as voiced characters. Some represented a single sound, others a two-character sound, and some a three-character sound. Many more hieroglyphs were added to represent the idea or to enhance the meaning of the word. These are commonly referred to as ideograms and they brought the number of identified hieroglyphs to over 4,000. This script, popularly called hieroglyphic, was both beautifully drawn as well colorfully painted. It was used for inscription on Egyptian monuments as well as a variety of written texts on papyrus.
Records show that hieroglyphic writing underwent the most significant changes during the Old Egyptian period. During the Middle Egyptian era, hieroglyphic stabilised and these hieroglyphs remained the same up until the disappearance of hieroglyphic. Therefore, one only needs to learn Middle Egyptian hieroglyphic to understand the vast majority of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. Hieroglyphic was used for all forms of written communication during the Old and Middle Egyptian eras. However, hieroglyphic was reserved for important religious texts during the Demotic era and was rarely found during the Coptic stage of Egyptian. The latest hieroglyphs known are at Philae and dated to 394 A.D. The next latest show the names of the Roman emperors Diocletian (yr. 12, 295A.D.) and Traianus Decius (249-251 A.D.)
As explained previously, the majority of hieroglyphs seen in any particular text do not represent the objects they depict. They mostly represent sounds or were used as "determinatives" to show what type of word was being used. Hieroglyphic could be written in the following ways:
1. Horizontal, left-to-right;
2. Horizontal, right-to-left;
3. Vertical, facing left-to-right;
4. Vertical, facing right-left.
Written, cursive hieroglyphic is generally written in columns, top-to-bottom or horizontally, right-to-left. In the latter stages of hieroglyphic cursive the only surviving examples are written horizontally, right-to-left; vertical hieroglyphic should be read from top-to-bottom.
It is generally an easy task to determine which way to read the hieroglyphs even if you are unable to understand their meaning. Hieroglyphs with a definite front and back (for example, a person) will generally:
1. Face the beginning of the sentence;
2. Face the same direction as any person or large object in a picture they describe
As an example, if a tableau contains a picture of a man seated and facing right, then all the hieroglyphs with a definite front and back would face to the right as well. The actual hieroglyphs would be read from right-to-left because these images almost always face the beginning of the sentence. Hieroglyphic texts that do not display this behaviour are said to be in retrograde. Once one understands hieroglyphic it is easy to determine if one is examining a retrograde text because it will simply make no sense at all! As an aid to reading, and perhaps to the Ancient Egyptian's sense of aesthetics, hieroglyphs were also packed together into neat patterns. In general, two or more short or thin (depending on which direction one was writing the hieroglyphs) would be written in the same block as each other. Occasionally, a tall or wide symbol would be made smaller and placed with another short or thin hieroglyph. Finally, hieroglyphic had no standard punctuation. Religious texts generally have no punctuation at all, whilst texts from the latter part of the Ancient Egyptian language have full stops between important lines of thought.
In parallel with the development of the hieroglyphic script, a second script came to light. Such script was a mere simplification of the artistic, and sometimes laborious, hieroglyphic. It was originally devised by the priests to record the records of the temples and then became a tool of the government servants, educated by the learned priests, who used it to record the affairs of the state. Due to the priestly origin of the script the name hieretic (=priestly) was popularly affixed to it. This script used the same symbols, drawn in a simplified way. There is no indication that script had as many ideograms as the hieroglyphic had.
With the decline of the state such a cumbersome writing method became impossible to preserve it as is. So in the fifth century B.C. a new script was devised that was both simpler to write and included about ten percent of the total number of hieroglyphs previously used. This new script came to be referred to as demotic. The cursive, and relatively ugly appearance of characters, in comparison to the hieroglyphic, was compensated for by its relative compactness. Many written records were preserved in that script but they dared not inscribe it on temple walls.