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Dr. Marwan Kilani

Department of Ancient Civilizations
Profiles & Affiliations

My Research Interests

PostDoc researcher at the University of Basel. His current project focuses on dialects in Late Egyptian and linguistic interactions between Egypt and the Levant during the New Kingdom. My academic interests touch on questions of socio-cultural interactions, identity, and the role languages and linguistics can have as sources of historical information.

Selected Publications

Kilani, Marwan. (2023). On the traces of “apples”, “plums”, and “pears” Investigating a wanderword in ancient and modern Near Eastern languages [Journal-article]. Journal of Historical Linguistics, Ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.22008.kil

URLs
URLs

Kilani, Marwan. (2023). Group writing. UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 1(1). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qf921w4

Kilani, Marwan. (2022). Egyptian words in the Late Bronze Age Levant. Fronteiras: Revista Catarinense de História, 40, 97–131. https://doi.org/10.36661/2238-9717.2022n40.12969

URLs
URLs

Selected Projects & Collaborations

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Like the conversation of a Delta man with a man from Elephantine! Exploring the interactions between dialectal realities, Levantine loanwords, and sociolinguistic dynamics in New Kingdom Egyptian

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in issues of Egyptian linguistics, with new collections of data and new types of evidence becoming available through the work of various scholars, including the present author. These works have raised interesting questions about issues of linguistic varieties and dialectal interferences, which call for a reassessment of the sociolinguistic landscape of pre-Coptic Egyptian. My project aims at exploring some of these questions within the context of New Kingdom Late Egyptian. The project will be divided into four phases that will explore four interrelated questions, namely: - Is the New Kingdom linguistic reality better described by a two-layers model (classical language ~ vernacular dialects) or a three-layers one (classical language ~ official/prestigious/court vernacular dialect ~ other vernacular dialects)? - Was there any shift in the main (official?) dialect underlying the Late Egyptian texts during the New Kingdom? And if yes, when and which dialects were involved? - How does the appearance of Levantine loanwords in New Kingdom sources correlates with pre-Coptic dialects? Could at least some of such loanwords be associated with a specific Delta dialect, and could the increase in their number reflect a shift in the official dialect? And if so, when did these Levantine words enter such Delta dialect? Can they be connected with the Hyksos phenomenon? - Was there any conscious linguistic policy during the New Kingdom, and was the main (official?) dialect actively promoted by the state (e.g. through didactic material) or does Late Egyptian represent a koiné that emerged naturally through a process of unconscious levelling of the (written) vernacular language used by the scribal communities across the country?

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Madùwwe : Collecting Egyptian Words

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

Madùwwe (/maˈduwwə/, the likely early New Kingdom pronunciation of 𓌃𓌃𓌃 : mdw.w = "words") is a project aiming at collecting digital lexical datasets for the Ancient Egyptian language. I have conceived the Madùwwe datasets to be used both by Egyptologists, by general historical linguists, and by computational linguists, and they are thus developped within an interdisciplinary, collaborative and opensource frame. This philosophy is reflected in the use of standardised transcriptions and transliterations, in coherent and regular encoding that makes the data easily accessible through scripts and digital methods, and in the multiple crossreferences to the databases of other major linguistic and egyptological projects. Madàwwe is a work-in-progress project - and so are the datasets that are currently hosted here. Details on the status of the different datasets are provided in the corresponding pages.