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Linguistic varieties such as female speech, foreigner talk, and colloquial language have not gone unnoticed when it comes to Classical Greek, but little is known about later periods of the Greek language. In this collective volume leading experts in the field outline some of the most important varieties of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, basing themselves on a broad range of literary and documentary sources, and advancing a number of innovative methodologies. Close attention is paid to the linguistic features that characterize these varieties, with in-depth discussions of lexical, morpho-syntactic, orthographic, and metrical variation, as well as the interrelationship between these different types of variation. The volume thus offers valuable insights into the nature of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, laying the foundation for future studies of linguistic variation in these later stages of the language, while at the same time providing a point of comparison for Classical Greek scholarship.

The corpus of Greek documentary papyri from Egypt consists of various types of documents, such as letters, contracts and accounts, showing different types of linguistic variation. The concept of register is applied here to examine the relationship between the presence of non-standard orthography and the situational context according to the situational variables setting, participants, genre and production circumstances. Quantitative study shows that the participants involved and the genre of the document are predictors for the amount of orthographic variation that is found in a document. Qualitative analysis of the documents in a number of archives reveals that there are also other important factors, such as the choice of scribe, method of production and the stage of composition of the text that is preserved to us, to explain the presence of orthographic variation in the corpus of documentary papyri.

In this chapter, several metrical varieties in a corpus of Byzantine book epigrams are explored. More specifically, we look into a number of varieties in metrical colophons of the type ἡ μὲν χεὶρ ἡ γράψασα‘ the hand that wrote [this]’, which was a very popular colophon throughout the entire Byzantine period. In its canonical form, these epigrams follow a dodecasyllabic metrical pattern, but many scribes freely experimented with the wording and the metrical structure of these colophons, which gives us a unique insight into the mechanics behind the colometrics of these texts and, by expansion, of Byzantine texts in general. The modern cognitive-linguistic theory of Information Units provides a fitting framework to interpret these varieties and to see them in a way that is different from the traditional reading of written texts. Indeed, the specific characteristics of these texts allow us to attribute certain oral characteristics to them, while still maintaining their written status. From this point of view, multiple reoccurring “mistakes” in the metre turnout to be varieties in disguise, originating from a wrongful pairing of correct metrical units (cola).

This chapter draws attention to the importance of studying not only linguistic variation in language, but also the patterned heterogeneity that can be related to it – in other words, linguistic varieties. Whereas the presence of varieties such as foreigner talk, female speech, colloquial language, etc. in the Classical period has received considerable attention, much less work has been done on the Post-classical and Byzantine periods, a situation which this edited volume hopes to remedy. Before outlining the contributions to the volume, we address a couple of central theoretical questions to research on linguistic varieties, such as the relationship between concepts like ‘variant’, ‘variety’ and ‘variation’, the modeling of varieties in terms of a ‘variational space’, the relationship between varieties, and the different methodologies that can be adopted to study linguistic varieties.

Specialists of the history of Ancient Greek scholarship and modern-day sociolinguists alike have made observations regarding the seemingly “distinctive” status of syntax: the former have argued there is no coherent theory of syntax in Ancient grammatical treatises, and the latter that syntactic variation is much less prominent in modern languages than lexical or phonetic/orthographic variation. The aim of this contribution is to confront these two perspectives by studying linguistic variation in three different types of sources: petitions in the Katochoi of the Sarapieion archive (II BCE), Phrynichus’ Ecloga (II CE), and the Life of Euthymius and its later metaphrasis (VI/X CE). It appears that syntactic variation plays a different role in these three types of sources, which I explain by referring to the cognitive status of syntax, which is more schematic and complex than lexis, and therefore less easily focused upon in“observer-centered”sources such as the Ecloga. At thesametime, I suggest that culture-specific explanations should be taken into account, too.

Recent findings in sociolinguistics have greatly enhanced our understanding of the mechanisms of linguistic variation and change. In this paper, I discuss the possibility of applying a historical sociolinguistic approach to a corpus language such as Ancient Greek. In the first part of my paper, I address the question of exactly how to take into account the relationship between language and social context. I review a number of recently made proposals, and their applicability to Ancient Greek. In the second part of my paper, I argue for the benefits of one specific approach, the Systemic Functional framework, applying it to particle usage in letters and petitions from Greco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt (I – VIII ad).