37.657, Confs: Multilingualism and Identities in the Roman Empire (Germany)

Tue Feb 17 11:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-657. Tue Feb 17 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.657, Confs: Multilingualism and Identities in the Roman Empire (Germany)

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Date: 16-Feb-2026
From: Ilja Serzant [serzant at uni-potsdam.de]
Subject: Multilingualism and Identities in the Roman Empire

Multilingualism and Identities in the Roman Empire

Date: 18-Nov-2026 - 20-Nov-2026
Location: Potsdam, Germany
Meeting URL: https://sites.google.com/view/mire26/home

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics;
Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 01-Apr-2026

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.
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.

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