So, our show's speciality is American history, but it just so happens that our digital producer studied abroad at the American University in Cairo a few years back and happens to know the answer to this question (she took a hieroglyphics course while she was there). **

The last remnant of the spoken Egyptian language survives today in the Egyptian Coptic Church. It's basically used as Latin is in the Catholic Church today -- essentially a dead language, used only in religious contexts. (Sorry for the wiki link, but it is concise): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language

You can still hear mass in Coptic if you went to a Coptic Church today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tnaluUcgAs

Whether or not it sounds like ancient Egyptians would have spoken is a tricky question. It does have some similarities to other regional languages like Arabic, Hebrew, or Aramaic. And 'modern' Coptic is descendent of later forms of the Egyptian language - so, probably more how people spoke in the early middle ages than in Ramses's time. I can't speak to the issues of grammar and structure in great detail, but I will say that hieroglyphs were an extremely formal and usually ceremonial way to write, so they're probably not a great comparison to how people spoke. Hieroglyphic texts often omitted vowel sounds, for example, and relied on the reader to fill them in from context. Some glyphs weren't even spoken out loud, as far as we know, but were just written markers of a persons rank -- like the famous cartouches that encircled the names of pharaohs. A good analogy of the difference between hieroglyphs and spoken language for Ancient Egyptians might be an educated Italian speaker in the Middle Ages - they'd probably write in Latin, which probably didn't sound much like the language spoken on the street, even though you could make the argument that they were branches of the same language.

Hope that helps! -Emily, BackStory Digital Producer

Like Arabic, Egyptian is an Afro-Asiatic language - a family of languages which stretches across northern and eastern Africa as well as much of the Middle East. Unlike Arabic (and Hebrew), it is not a Semitic language.

Egyptian hieroglyphs had both a semantic/illustrative element and a phonetic element, much like modern Chinese characters (though not as much Japanese). However, the phonetic component was an "abjad" - an "unvocalized" alphabet where all consonants were written, but not many vowels. As such, we have a good idea of what the consonants sounded like, but many of the vowels are more speculative. Much of the information we have comes from the Greek transliterations of Egyptian words, as well as later forms of the language.

After the Hellenic conquests, Egyptian was (iirc) supplanted as the nation's official administrative language by Greek. However, the Egyptian language continued in a Hellenized form known as Coptic, with a Greek-derived alphabet. This language now has a very small number of fluent speakers, but is used as a liturgical language by the Coptic Orthodox Church. Additionally, colloquial Egyptian Arabic takes a lot of influence from the Egyptian language.