UTF-8 Coptic

The Coptic alphabet was developed around the 2nd century in Egypt, for writing the Coptic language, the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language.

With the spread of Christianity in Egypt, Greek became the language of administration and church, and Coptic emerged as a practical way to write Egyptian using Greek letters.

Egyptian had previously used hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic scripts.

The majority of Coptic letters are directly taken from the Greek alphabet, since Greek was widely used in Egypt after Alexander the Great's conquest.

To represent sounds specific to Egyptian that Greek did not have, several characters were borrowed from the Demotic script (a cursive form of ancient Egyptian writing). Examples include characters like Ϣ (shai) and Ϥ (fei).

After the Arab conquest of Egypt in the 7th century, Arabic gradually replaced Coptic.

The Coptic Orthodox and Catholic Churches still use Coptic in their prayers, hymns, and scriptures.

Originally in UTF-8, Coptic was represented as a part of the Greek and Coptic character block, now the script has its own dedicated Unicode block, and is digitally represented separately from Greek:

Hex 2C80-2CFF / Dec 11392-11519