Culture of Egypt
Arabic is Egypt's official language, it came to Egypt in the 7th century, and the Egyptian Arabic dialect today has become the modern speech of the country. Of the many varieties of Arabic, it is the most widely spoken second dialect, due to the influence of Egyptian cinema and media throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Egypt's position in the heart of the Arab world has also had reversed influence, adopting many words, phrases, and proverbs from neighboring Arabic speaking areas such as the Maghreb area and the Mashriq. Today the daily Egyptian Arabic adopted several French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Armenian and English words to its dictionary, as well as keeping several other words from its own ancient languages such as Coptic and Demotic.
Geographical distribution of French speakers
French began to lose ground in Egyptian society in the 1920s for a number of political and social reasons; from the 1930s onwards English became the main foreign language, but French was still being learnt by 8 million Egyptians in 2013. There are two French-speaking universities in the country, the Université Française d'Égypte and the Université Senghor.