Egypt Culture & Language

Egypt is Arabic-speaking and majority Muslim, with a Coptic Christian minority whose church is one of the oldest in the world and whose liturgical language descends directly from ancient Egyptian.

The ancient past is not sealed off in museums: villages sit beside temples, and the Nile still structures agriculture as it always did, though the High Dam ended the annual flood in the 1960s.

Cairo has been the cultural capital of the Arab world for a century. Egyptian cinema and music dominated the region for decades, and the Egyptian dialect is the most widely understood Arabic variety because of it.

Daily culture centres on hospitality, coffee houses and food that is legume-based and inexpensive — ful medames, ta’meya, koshary. Ramadan reshapes the entire rhythm of the day for a month each year.

Arabic is the official language, and Egyptian colloquial Arabic is the most widely understood dialect in the Arab world thanks to a century of Egyptian cinema and music.

English is widely spoken in tourism, hotels and among educated Egyptians, and much less so elsewhere. A few Arabic words are received with real warmth.

Salam alaykum as a greeting, shukran for thank you, la shukran for no thank you — the last of which is genuinely useful — and inshallah, which you will hear constantly.