Linguistic Variation in Old Kingdom Speech Captions

This paper will explore the text corpus known as Reden und Rufe. The focus will lie on Old Kingdom data, but later material will be compared. From the end of the 4th dynasty, “daily-life” depictions in elite tombs are sporadically complemented with face-to-face interchanges. Over time, these speech captions become more frequent, oscillating between reproductive and productive traditions. They also spread from the Memphite area to the Middle Egypt necropoleis, as far as Qasr el-Sayad, close to the modern city of Nag Hammadi. Such a geographical dispersion and a chronological span offer insights into the language variation and change in Earlier Egyptian. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it will exemplify the diachronic, diaphasic, diatopic, and diastratic variations considering syntax and morphology together with pragmatics. On the other hand, it will question the language standardization and attempt to set out when a situation of diglossia might have arisen.