Abstract This introduction to the volume on social factors in Latinization weaves together key themes and offers further fuel for the debates tackled in the chapters. It argues that the story of Latinization has suffered from too much focus on the elite-level dimension—namely, linguistic imperialism and the vain search for wide-ranging language policies. While attitudes of the elites and language management, broadly conceived, did play a role in the promotion and spread of Latin, the exploration of the uptake of Latin in the provinces must also consider a series of social factors in local contexts and try to make sense of complex local identities and their relationships to language. But, since life is full of intertwined sociocultural elements, and language is part of everything and linked to everything, it is not easy to isolate and assess the impact of specific factors that may have promoted the spread of Latin, encouraged the retention of local languages or fostered bilingualism. Our evidence is also patchy and fragile: there are voices that we struggle to hear—for example, those of women—and limitations on our ability to interpret often poorly contextualized data or extrapolate from isolated caches of texts. Despite the difficulties, we argue that through a multidisciplinary approach, which draws on recent advances in sociolinguistics, we can explore differential Latinization, regionality, local languages, and literacies and advance our understanding of provincial linguistic experience.
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