Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Text

Bilingualism - the field of language contact - has seen an explosion of work in recent years, yet relatively little of this has focused on written texts. This volume aims to introduce classicists, ancient historians, and other scholars interested in sociolinguistic research to the evidence of bilingualism in the ancient Mediterranean world. Language contact intruded into virtually every aspect of ancient life, and topics which have been fashionable in sociolinguistics for some time have now begun to attract the attention of scholars working in Graceo-Roman studies. The fifteen original essays in this collection, which have been written by well-regarded experts, cover theoretical and methodological issues and key aspects of the contact between Latin and Greek and among Latin, Greek, and other languages. The collection is held together by a wide-ranging introduction which discusses the many important topics recurring in the volume in the light of current work in classics and sociolinguistics.