Greek in Italy: investigating the linguistic effect of the long-term presence of Greek speakers on the languages of Ancient Italy.

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In the course of the first millennium BC Greek sailors, traders and colonists visited and settled in the Italian peninsula in increasing numbers. So much so, that the southern half of Italy became known as 'Big Greece', both by Romans (Magna Graecia) and Greeks (Megale Hellas). Greeks brought with them urban living, religion and wine drinking, together with the alphabet and its associated uses. Some cities of Italy, including Naples, Rhegium and Tarentum, remained Greek speaking under Roman rule. Substantial archaeological and textual discoveries in the last three decades have opened up our knowledge of the Greeks in Italy and the native societies they encountered, but there has been no complete study of the impact made by Greek on indigenous languages. This project aims to fill this gap, and will consider the nature and outcomes of contact between Greeks and speakers of the various native languages of ancient Italy, investigating the changes on the languages themselves, and relating linguistic interactions to social and political factors. This project will bring a new approach to the study of the impact of Greeks in Italy by combining two major recent research developments in research, linking studies of micro-regions in the Mediterranean, which emphasize networks and connectivity (e.g. Horden & Purcell The Corrupting Sea 2000), within the context of new work on ancient language contact (e.g. Adams Bilingualism and the Latin Language 2003).The project will work from a rich, but manageable data set. Epigraphic sources will be the primary focus, since inscriptions furnish the principle record for nearly all of the ancient languages once spoken in Italy (Latin is of course the exception). Recent research has hugely enhanced our knowledge of the non-Latin languages of Italy through the publication of new corpora, including Imagines Italicae (2011), the result of an AHRC project. These corpora allow us to tally the linguistic evidence with known archaeological or historical contexts. The project team will comprise researchers with expertise on both the Greek language and the native languages of Italy, with overlapping strengths in historical / comparative linguistics, epigraphy and classical studies. Through collaborative research and by pooling expertise and knowledge of different areas and languages, we will gain a fuller picture of the complexity of bilingual and multilingual interaction in Italy over several centuries. We will develop methodologies for using epigraphic material to construct a picture of interactions between speech communities, and for interpreting similarities of script and uses of literacy. The findings of the project will shed new light on ancient history, and set a standard for the investigation of the long-term impact of migration and colonization on language use and change.The project will be based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, which affords excellent institutional support for ancient history, epigraphy, and comparative/historical linguistics. The PI (James Clackson) and Co-I (Geoff Horrocks) have internationally recognized expertise in the linguistic study of the Classical languages, and a proven record of collaborative research (joint publication Blackwell History of the Latin Language, 2007). The project will employ two post-doctoral researchers, Nicholas Zair and Katherine McDonald, and one PhD student.The members of the project team will focus on different areas: Clackson on the early history of Latin and variation in the impact of Greek on different speech communities; Horrocks on developments in Greek in Italy; Zair will be concerned principally with phonological and morphological change within the Sabellian language family and McDonald will investigate long term contact and change between Greek, Oscan and Messapic in the far south of Italy. The associated PhD studentship will allow a student to work on the language of Greek inscriptions from southern Italy.