UTF-8 Coptic

The Coptic Alphabet

The Coptic alphabet was developed around the 2nd century in Egypt, for writing the Coptic language, the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language. Egyptian had previously used hieroglyphs.

With the spread of Christianity in Egypt, Greek became the language of administration and church, and Coptic emerged as a practical way to write Egyptian using Greek letters. The majority of Coptic letters are directly taken from the Greek alphabet.

Originally in UTF-8, Coptic was represented as a part of the Greek and Coptic character block. Now the script has its own dedicated Unicode block, and is digitally represented separately from Greek.

The Coptic Orthodox and Catholic Churches still use Coptic in their prayers, hymns, and scriptures.