Decline of Ancient Greek dialects and the spread of the Attic-Ionic Koine.
What is it about?
Detailed description of the decline of Ancient Greek dialects: Doric dialects in the Peloponnese (Laconia, Messenia, Argolis, Corinthia), Crete, Aegean islands (Rhodes, Cos); Aeolic dialects (spoken in Boeotia, Thessaly, Lesbos); and Arcado-Cypriot dialects (in Arcadia and Cyprus). Expansion of Attic and the penetration of the Attic dialect by Ionic during the 5th c. The rise of the Attic-Ionic Koine. Growth and spread of the regional varieties of the Attic-Ionic Koine in Hellenistic monarchies in eastern Mediterranean: Egyptian (Ptolemaic), Syro-Palestinian (esp. Biblical) and Asia Minor varieties. Formation of dialectal Doric-based 'koinas' (North-West, South-East Aegean, Sicilian). Hellenistic Koine in contact with other languages (Egyptian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Latin and aboriginal languages of Asia Minor). Beginnings of Greek 'diglossia' and the rise of pan-Hellenic 'standard' language.
Why is it important?
Ancient Greek dialects have been studied 'in time' and space' (diachrony and diatopy) in terms of time-honored methodology used by Historical and Comparative Linguistics for the reconstruction of a proto-language. Applied to the dialects of a single language it is possible to reach the stage of 'Proto-Greek'; moving 'downstream' from their 'common' stage it is possible to elaborate a systematic presentation of the most likely historical processes responsible for the changes in phonology and grammar found at subsequent stages of the major dialectal groups of Ancient Greek. However, this overall approach is not quite suitable for the work on the post-Classical periods (Hellenistic and Roman) whose main issues are of a sociolinguistic nature: decline of Classical dialects, the spatial diffusion of the Attic-Ionic Koine, and the growth of various 'dialectal Koinas'. The two dimensional investigation into the history of Ancient Greek has to be supplemented using the tools of contemporary dialectology and sociolinguistics: lexical and social diffusion of linguistic change; statistical analysis capturing the difference between 'public' and 'private' documents (where allowed by the corpus); dialect mixing and 'diglossia'; the coexistence of the 'high' variety (the literary standards of the 'pure' Attic) and the 'mesolectal' varieties of Koine: the 'high register' represented by Hellenistic Koine and a 'low register' represented by Doric koinas.