Volume 11, Issue 1 - Special collection: Language Change from Above and from Below in Greek and Latin; Guest Editors: Ezra la Roi and Dalia Pratali Maffei

In this paper, I ask how colonial and academic writings from the 19th and early 20th centuries are responsible for the gender-stereotyping and linguistic-stereotyping of ukuhlonipha, an avoidance-based custom of respect traditionally applied to in-laws among Nguni-speaking communities in Southern Africa. I engage in the historical recovery process by suggesting that the knowledge circulation from colonial-era South Africa to philological and anthropological theories of imperial-era Europe is evidence of a knowledge erasure about the custom of ukuhlonipha.

This article relates Gibraltar’s historic half-oral, half-written bilingual streetname system to its eighteenth-century founding multilingual population. Using the geolinguistic concept of types of mobilities, we demonstrate the existence of communities of spatial practice who serviced forts in Gibraltar, Menorca, Ceuta and Melilla, and who predominantly hailed from Britain, Genoa, Menorca, Morocco and Portugal. We use the term ‘spatial practice’ in the sense that these speakers made recurrent journeys around Western Mediterranean forts over generations, establishing a conduit of language interchange. The linguistic feature studied here is surnames integrated into Gibraltar’s streetnames over a period of time, constituting an archaeological trace of a subset of British Gibraltar’s founding families. Gender is implicated in this account, as the Llanito (the contact variety of Spanish spoken in Gibraltar) streetnames were transmitted by Spanish women who married Gibraltarians, creating Gibraltarian hispanophone domestic environments. These are now in the process of being lost as the older generation has ceased speaking Llanito to children, a consequence of Franco’s closure 1969–1985 of the land-border. This loss of cultural heritage is significant as the concept of a historical Gibraltarian identity is challenged whenever politicians question Gibraltar’s sovereignty. Our analysis demonstrates that the continuity of a cohesive tricentenarian community is audible (if only partially visible) in its bilingual streetscape.

This article examines a significant yet often overlooked event in the history of Romani activism – the submission of a petition demanding equal linguistic rights by a delegation of Hungarian Roma to the Austrian Emperor in May 1850. By analysing contemporary sources, we reconstruct the event and explore its historical context, and, by using the Discourse-Historical Approach, we shed light on the media’s portrayal of the Roma and their language. We identify dominant discourses related to ‘nationhood’, ‘belonging’, and ‘inequality’ surrounding the Roma. The article provides fresh insights about the 1850 event and two other grassroots initiatives of Romani activism that followed, all of which indicate a conscious effort by the Roma to address their concerns and aspirations despite the predominantly unfavourable political climate of the time.

New insights into the analysis of linguistic variation and change in the past are afforded through the lens of ideologies and personae. Woolard (1998. Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard & Paul V. Kroskrity (eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory , 3–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press) argues that studies of attitudes, prestige, standards, etc. could profit from a rethinking within an explicitly social-theoretical frame of ideology analysis. In this article I outline how in seventeenth-century French metalinguistic writing the ideology of the standard, prescription and purism infuse the hierarchization of linguistic variants and the presentation of the qualities of what constitutes ‘good usage’. I next examine how the increasingly value-laden standard language creates linguistic insecurity in French speakers. The sociohistorical context at once shapes and reflects the dominant intersecting linguistic ideologies and thus the discussion of language in seventeenth-century French metalinguistic texts. In the ideological and sociohistorical context of seventeenth-century French society, a number of personae emerge who feature widely in courtesy books, literary discussions and metalinguistic texts, notably the honnête homme , the honnête femme , and the précieuse . These personae are at once created by literary and metalinguistic texts, and recognized and labelled by them as existing personae. Having demonstrated the benefits of using this approach for sociohistorical linguistics, the picture is then nuanced through consideration of the realities of both linguistic practices and the way they are described and analysed in metalinguistic texts. While, perhaps predictably, the linguistic reality is more complex than the ideologies which overlay it, the socio-theoretical framework of ideology analysis, when used sensitively, provides a fruitful lens for reading variation and change in the past.

This study investigates the sacred language ideology behind Nomina Sacra, which are contractions of certain words in religious texts used to express awe towards the referent. This study analyzes 170 New Testament Manuscripts written from the second century to the fifth century CE. The macro analysis finds no evidence of a language policy even after the Edict of Milan (313 CE), when Christianity became a dominant religion within the Roman Empire. However, the meso and micro analyses unveil two factors that potentially contribute to variations in the employment of Nomina Sacra: (1) the meso context, linguistic ideologies cultivated and propagated by local churches, and (2) the micro context, individual scribes’ personal preferences for using Nomina Sacra. The research findings of the meso contexts demonstrate the indexical fields of Nomina Sacra – namely, a degree of strong and weak linguistic ideologies for their contractions’ referents – between the second to fifth century CE. In addition, a micro analysis shows individual scribes’ styles of applying Nomina Sacra, which were based on their perspectives on the sacred language ideologies.

A crucial challenge in documenting the histories of languages of the past is accessing sources of language change from ‘above’ as well as ‘below’. In this methodological paper, I critically discuss potential problems and solutions for investigating language change from above and below in Post-Classical Greek (III BCE – VI CE) and Post-Classical Latin (III – X CE). I detail and dissect the three main challenges to such investigations: (i) the representativity of the sources, (ii) tracing the motivations for change, and (iii) incorporating the social and societal processes involved in change from above and below. By means of a critical review of existing research, I argue that we can overcome these challenges if we arm ourselves with recent insights from the field of historical sociolinguistics. Finally, I discuss three cases of Post-Classical Greek innovations that, based on their later diffusion, can only partially be explained as change from above or below.

This paper discusses dialectal change in Hellenistic inscribed epigrams through the analysis of Doric features in epigrams from Doric-speaking areas, from a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Epigrams were short poems written on inscriptions for different occasions, which attested a mixture of supra-regional poetic dialectal features and regional dialectal features from everyday speech. Scholars have argued that the dialect of inscribed epigrams underwent a change ‘from above’ in the Hellenistic age (4th – 1st century BC): regional features supposedly disappeared in favour of supra-regional varieties, because Koine Greek was replacing regional dialects as language of prestige in speech, while epigrams started to be produced for books and were written in literary dialects. I aim to gain a more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon, by examining the type of Doric features attested in the corpus of epigrams selected, their presence in poetry and/or prose inscriptions, their distribution by linguistic level, their synchronic and diachronic frequency in epigrams and their co-occurrence patterns. This analysis will show that the Doric features attested are those most resilient in contemporary prose inscriptions across the areas and that they were distributed in epigrams according to recurring patterns, and not accidentally. This reveals that, unlike previously thought, the local context and its dialects still had an influence on the dialect of inscribed epigrams. The relationship between supra-regional and regional dialectal forms can thus be interpreted as one of ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ prestige, where regional features held covert prestige and were used to allude to the local context.

This article focuses on the relationship between ‘change from above’ and ‘change from below’ as intended in the purist tendencies of the Atticist lexicographers of the second century CE. The production of Atticist lexica in the second century CE – as a manifestation of the purist trend that characterized the Greco-Roman world since the first century BCE-sought to reproduce an alleged Classical Greek through the prescription of morphological, lexical and syntactic features. The purists’ attempt to promote a specific kind of language reflected a progressive tendency to use language to construct social categories. The community of educated speakers was defined by the selection of linguistic features that differed from those used by the masses and became distinctive signs of education and elitism. By analyzing examples from these lexica, I will examine the mechanisms purists use to cleanse contemporary language from the changes that have affected the Koine. In order to do this, I will use the frameworks of modern sociolinguistics and, in particular, I will refer to three semiotic processes proposed by Irvine and Gal. 1995. The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research 62(4). 967–1001; Irvine and Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities , 35–84. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press: 1) Iconization, which is expressed in the association that Atticist lexicographers make between supposedly pure/correct forms and certain social and ethnic groups (e.g., educated people/Attic writers/the ancients, etc.); 2) fractal recursivity, which is reflected in the Atticists’ projection of the opposition “Attic versus barbarian” onto the dualism “Attic versus non-Attic”; and 3) erasure, which is represented by the Atticists’ disregard for linguistic variation and their interpretation of Attic as a monolithic system. This analysis aims to describe the ideological factors that support linguistic purism and the mechanisms behind the prescription of a language consistently detached from contemporary usage.

This paper focuses on lexical variation between the two Latin words for epistolary letter , epistula and litterae , gathering data from the corpus of Ciceronian epistolography. It aims to serve as a case-study of how one might use literary material to analyse sociolinguistic variation in Latin, focusing on the connection between an author᾽s social background and his linguistic output. Twenty of Cicero᾽s correspondents use either variant and their usage is considered with respect to macrosocial categories such as age and social status. However, by looking at Cicero᾽s own usage of the two variants to different individuals, factors such as social relationships and linguistic attitudes are also taken into consideration. By examining the distribution of the two nouns in Early and imperial Latin, we see that the late Republic appears to be unusual with regards to many writers᾽ apparent avoidance of the noun epistula . I suggest that this avoidance of epistula may stem from the linguistic attitudes and debates of the period, and I show that the stigma posited for epistula affectected authors of particular background more than others. Further, we see that the relationship between a correspondent and his addressee was an important factor when it came to choosing how to say ‘a letter’ in a letter.

In concluding this special issue on language change from above and below in Ancient Greek and Latin, I explore common themes across the contributions and ground them more firmly in the histories of these classical languages and in historical sociolinguistic scholarship. The discussion addresses the challenges presented by written sources, the analytical perspectives adopted, the language ideologies underlying written production, and the social factors influencing language change. I conclude by advocating for the integrated linguistic study of Greek and Latin, arguing that this approach provides a more nuanced understanding of their development.