CALL FOR PAPERS

As one of the dominant languages of the Roman Empire, Greek Koiné continues to play a very important role during the Roman period and shows a big deal of diatopic and diastratal (social and political) variation. One such example is Atticism: the classical language came to be considered as “the ideal variety” as opposed to the administrative Koiné that is dissociated from any literary tradition (inter alia, Swain 1996; Schmitz 1997; Silk 2009; Strobel 2009; Rafiyenko & Seržant 2022). Imitating the classical language produced a new literary register referred to as Learned Language, which combines authentic usage with hypercorrect lexical choices and patterns and inevitably shows some effects of Koiné (inter alia, Strobel 2009; Benedetti 2020; García Ramón 2020; Rafiyenko & Seržant 2020). At the same time, Greek (and Latin) coexisted with numerous other more or less local languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic etc. While some of them appear to have become extinct during the Roman imperial times (Etruscan is attested as being spoken for the last time in the 2nd century CE), others not only remained vital, but reacquired more visibility and their own literary tradition in Late Antiquity, and became a crucial facet in the expression of specific regional and religious identities.

More generally, the use of language – and specifically, of concrete varieties – is a performative act of enormous relevance in expressing, shaping and reinforcing identity, as well as in claiming belonging or affiliation to specific groups, as sociolinguistic studies (for example, on phenomena such as crossing) have demonstrated. 

The goal of this conference is to bring together scholars working on different cultural and linguistic aspects of the multilingual society of the Roman Empire, in order to investigate how the Greek language, in its interaction with the other languages written and spoken within the Roman Empire, was deployed and performed as part of a complex cultural discourse and was entangled in the construction of imperial segmentary identities. 

We encourage submissions addressing (but not limited to) the following questions: 

• The social, historical and cultural environment that potentially may have constrained the language of that period; influence of other languages and the way interaction with other languages was organized

• How native and second-language speakers of Greek index their identities in their linguistic production with respect to both grammar and lexicon, for example when accommodating effects of Atticism (cf. Rafiyenko & Seržant 2022); effects of Learned Language (Strobel 2009); effects of local and regional varieties on the standard (García Ramón 2020)

• Effects of multilingualism on Greek as the source or target language;

• The role played by translations to and from Greek within the multilingual context of the multicultural society of the Roman imperium

• The role(s) played by switching and crossing languages in performing identities and claiming belonging within the multilingual and multicultural society of the Roman empire – both in written texts and in oral performances?

• How may methods from Digital Humanities contribute to the questions addressed in the workshop?

• We encourage corpus-based and quantitative approaches to the questions posed above.

Please keep in mind that this conference is an exclusively in-presence event, and participating/attending online is not possible.

Abstracts should be sent via email to: multilingualism@uni-potsdam.de

Important dates

Submission: April 1, 2026

Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2026

Conference: November 18–20, 2026

References

• Benedetti, M., 2020. The perfect paradigm in Theodosius’ Κανόνες: diathetically indifferent and diathetically non-indifferent forms. In: D. Rafiyenko and I.A. Seržant, eds. Contemporary Approaches to Postclassical Greek. Trends in Linguistics series. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 205‑220.

• García Ramón, J.L., 2020. Grammatical and lexical structures on change in Postclassical Greek: local dialects and supradialectal tendencies. In: D. Rafiyenko and I.A. Seržant, eds. Contemporary Approaches to Postclassical Greek. Trends in Linguistics series. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 303‑336.

• Rafiyenko, D. & Seržant, I.A., 2020. Postclassical Greek. An overview. In: D. Rafiyenko and I.A. Seržant, eds. Contemporary Approaches to Postclassical Greek. Trends in Linguistics series. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1‑18.

• Seržant, I.A. & Rafiyenko, D., 2021. Diachronic evidence against the source-oriented explanation in typology. Evolution of Prepositional Phrases in Ancient Greek. Language Dynamics and Change, 11 (2), 167‑210.

• Schmitz, T., 1997. Bildung und Macht. Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der Zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Munich: Beck.

• Silk, M., 2009. The Invention of Greek: Macedonians, Poets and Others. In: A. Georgakopoulou and M. Silk, eds. Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present. Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London Publications 12. Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate, 3‑31.

• Strobel, C., 2009. The Lexica of the Second Sophistic: Safeguarding Atticism. In: A. Georgakopoulou and M. Silk, eds. Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present. Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London Publications 12. Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate, 93‑108.

• Swain, S., 1996. Hellenism and empire : language, classicism, and power in the Greek world, AD 50-250. Oxford: Clarendon Press.