L2 Greek in Roman Egypt: Intense language contact in Roman military forts

Abstract

Abstract This paper will focus on analysing user-related variation in Greek in Egypt as seen through potsherd letters (ostraka) of the residents of Roman forts, praesidia, in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The letters can be dated to the first and second centuries CE. I suggest that the linguistic situation in the forts can be seen as evidence of extensive language contact that was connected with the considerable economic activity of the Roman Empire. All military forts had several L2 Greek speakers of various ethnicity. In what follows I will suggest that Roman soldiers and their civil partners had created a system that can be described as a feature pool of Greek variables. I suggest that the data from Egypt show that L2 speakers of Greek had an effect on Greek at all grammatical levels, strengthening existing and ongoing endogenous changes by creating substantial contact-induced variation in phonology as well as in morphosyntax and even phraseology. The intense language contact suggests, in my opinion, that language dynamics of this period follow the resilience theory, where various different phases of the adaptive cycle can be simultaneous, as almost all possible varieties of Greek, from historical High Attic to Multiethnic Greek are in use.