History: Egypt

The official language of the Republic is Modern Standard Arabic. The spoken languages are: Egyptian Arabic (68%), Sa'idi Arabic (29%), Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic (1.6%), Sudanese Arabic (0.6%), Domari (0.3%), Nobiin (0.3%), Beja (0.1%), Siwi and others. Additionally, Greek, Armenian and Italian are the main languages of immigrants. In Alexandria in the 19th century there was a huge community of Italian Egyptians and Italian was the "lingua franca" of the city.
The main taught foreign languages in schools are English, French, German and sometimes Italian.
The historical languages include the Egyptian languages (also known as Copto-Egyptian) consisting of ancient Egyptian and Coptic, and form a separate branch among the family of Afro-Asiatic languages.
The "Koiné" dialect of the Greek language was important in Hellenistic Alexandria, and was used in the philosophy and science of that culture, and was also studied by later Arabic scholars.