In this work I have studied the language contact situation between Egyptian and Greek in Roman period Egypt. I have analysed the language use of a corpus written by Egyptian scribe apprentices, OGN I (Ostraca greci da Narmuthis), rich with nonstandard variation due to the imperfect Greek learning of the young scribes. I concentrated on finding Egyptian phonological influence from the misspellings of the vowels that displayed variation atypical for native language writers. Among the nonstandard features were, for example, underdifferentiation of foreign phonemes, the reduction of word-final vowels, allophonic variation that matched Coptic prosodic rules, and coarticulation of consonants on vowels. All of these linguistic characteristics can be found also in the near-phonetic nonstandard spellings of Greek loanwords in Coptic, which I used as parallel reference material. Studying the similarly phonetically-based orthographic variants in Arabic loanwords in Coptic from a later period gave me information on Coptic vowel qualities, by which I could confirm that most of the nonstandard vowel variation in the texts of OGN I was not related to Greek internal phonological development but Egyptian influence. During the project I began to suspect that there might have been an independent Egyptian Greek variety in existence, similarly to for example Indian English, with transfer features from especially the phonological level of Egyptian. I found enough conclusive evidence of a variety of this type to be able to continue research on it after the doctoral dissertation. In order to be able to obtain knowledge of the spoken level of these languages which are no longer spoken, I used modern phonetic research as my aid, and especially concentrated on loanword phonology. I believe I have found enough evidence of the methods of integration of these loanwords and foreign words into Egyptian to be able to contribute to the ongoing debate about whether loan adaptation is based on the phonological level or the phonetic one. I found evidence of both, quite often working simultaneously
