Report from the conference Sociolinguistic Variation in Ancient Languages. Towards Third Wave Approaches and Beyond by Sólveig Hilmarsdóttir and Dalia Pratali Maffei.
The so-called Third Wave approach to sociolinguistic variation has received notable attention in the sociolinguistic study of modern languages. The approach is usually associated with the work of Penelope Eckert (see e.g., Eckert 2008), and work within this framework has called for a focus on the social meaning of linguistic variants and argued that linguistic variants are not directly correlated to social categories or to a specific meaning, but that their meaning is unspecified and dynamic (Hall-Lew, Moore and Podesva 2021).
Although some steps have been taken towards integrating such a perspective to historical languages like Late Medieval and Late Modern English (see e.g., Conde Silvestre 2016 and García-Vidal 2023), most studies on ancient languages have not made use of this approach yet. The aim of the three-day conference Sociolinguistic Variation in Ancient Languages. Towards Third Wave Approaches and Beyond was therefore to create and foster a conversation about the methods and perspectives needed to advance sociolinguistic approaches to ancient languages. Due to the fragmentary and incomplete nature of our materials, these can differ significantly from methods to modern languages.
The conference was held on March 26-28th in Jesus College and in the Faculty of Classics. We had around 80 participants (including speakers, chairs and student helpers). These came from all over the world, from 20 countries and 50 different institutions. Most were able to join us in person in Cambridge but we also had several participants who joined virtually. The programme was spread over three days, and it was organised into five different thematic sessions. These broadly captured the themes of the seventeen papers which we were able to accept:
- Language and Identity (Sung Min Park; Giuseppina di Bartolo and Liana Tronci; Matthew Glass; Shoni Lavie-Driver)
- Writing Practices and Social Meaning (Josh Brown; Victoria Almansa-Villatoro; Laura Nastasi; Luca Rigobianco)
- Metalinguistic Perspectives on Variation (Serena Barchi; Eleonora Cattafi; Joseph Miller; Ezra la Roi)
- Variation in Literary Sources (Agnes Vendel de Aguiar; Hung-Yun Liu)
- Registers and Language Choices (Siu Pong Cheng; Irene Chioni; Eleonora Selvi)
We were also fortunate to be joined by three keynote speakers, who each focused on different aspects of the conference theme. The sociolinguist Penelope Eckert (Stanford) gave the first keynote ‘Where does the indexical field live?’. Eleanor Dickey (Reading) analysed aspects of politeness in Latin and Greek, in a keynote titled ‘Politeness versus Classicism in Latin’. Klaas Bentein (Gent) offered a wide-ranging perspective on Greek sociolinguistics in the final keynote, ‘‘Literary’ stylization in ‘non-literary’ Ancient Greek texts: A digitally oriented, multi-modal approach’.
The full programme and paper titles is available here: https://svalconference.wordpress.com/