Dialectal variation in republican Latin, with special reference to Praenestine

Abstract

1.1 Dialectical diversity is common to all languages. It comes about when groups of speakers of the same language become isolated from one another and from the conformist pressures of an administrative or cultural centre. The tendency to local change can be accelerated by the presence nearby of another language and the growth of bilingual interaction in settled conditions over several generations. Like linguistic change in general, dialectal diversity tends to be retarded by improved communications and a universal homogeneous education system. 1.2 Modern dialect geographers go about their work with a questionnaire, a tape-recorder and a note-book, listing items of pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and syntax that distinguish particular localities from one another. If their aim is not the purely linguistic one of establishing an underlying diasystem and the range of variation within it, but is more concerned with the sociological aspects of the linguistic data, then they will plot the dialectical variations against the ‘standard’ language, viz. the dialect which because of its association with an administrative or cultural capital has in an elaborated and artificial form acquired prestige and dominance throughout the whole speech community. If researchers find that their information is incomplete, they can simply return to the field with further questions.

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