Greek in Italy: investigating the linguistic effect of the long-term presence of Greek speakers on the languages of Ancient Italy.

In the course of the first millennium BC Greek sailors, traders and colonists visited and settled in the Italian peninsula in increasing numbers. So much so, that the southern half of Italy became known as 'Big Greece', both by Romans (Magna Graecia) and Greeks (Megale Hellas). Greeks brought with them urban living, religion and wine drinking, together with the alphabet and its associated uses. Some cities of Italy, including Naples, Rhegium and Tarentum, remained Greek speaking under Roman rule. Substantial archaeological and textual discoveries in the last three decades have opened up our knowledge of the Greeks in Italy and the native societies they encountered, but there has been no complete study of the impact made by Greek on indigenous languages. This project aims to fill this gap, and will consider the nature and outcomes of contact between Greeks and speakers of the various native languages of ancient Italy, investigating the changes on the languages themselves, and relating linguistic interactions to social and political factors. This project will bring a new approach to the study of the impact of Greeks in Italy by combining two major recent research developments in research, linking studies of micro-regions in the Mediterranean, which emphasize networks and connectivity (e.g. Horden & Purcell The Corrupting Sea 2000), within the context of new work on ancient language contact (e.g. Adams Bilingualism and the Latin Language 2003).
The project will work from a rich, but manageable data set. Epigraphic sources will be the primary focus, since inscriptions furnish the principle record for nearly all of the ancient languages once spoken in Italy (Latin is of course the exception). Recent research has hugely enhanced our knowledge of the non-Latin languages of Italy through the publication of new corpora, including Imagines Italicae (2011), the result of an AHRC project. These corpora allow us to tally the linguistic evidence with known archaeological or historical contexts.
The project team will comprise researchers with expertise on both the Greek language and the native languages of Italy, with overlapping strengths in historical / comparative linguistics, epigraphy and classical studies. Through collaborative research and by pooling expertise and knowledge of different areas and languages, we will gain a fuller picture of the complexity of bilingual and multilingual interaction in Italy over several centuries. We will develop methodologies for using epigraphic material to construct a picture of interactions between speech communities, and for interpreting similarities of script and uses of literacy. The findings of the project will shed new light on ancient history, and set a standard for the investigation of the long-term impact of migration and colonization on language use and change.
The project will be based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, which affords excellent institutional support for ancient history, epigraphy, and comparative/historical linguistics. The PI (James Clackson) and Co-I (Geoff Horrocks) have internationally recognized expertise in the linguistic study of the Classical languages, and a proven record of collaborative research (joint publication Blackwell History of the Latin Language, 2007). The project will employ two post-doctoral researchers, Nicholas Zair and Katherine McDonald, and one PhD student.
The members of the project team will focus on different areas: Clackson on the early history of Latin and variation in the impact of Greek on different speech communities; Horrocks on developments in Greek in Italy; Zair will be concerned principally with phonological and morphological change within the Sabellian language family and McDonald will investigate long term contact and change between Greek, Oscan and Messapic in the far south of Italy. The associated PhD studentship will allow a student to work on the language of Greek inscriptions from southern Italy.

Language use and migration are topics of current interest and concern. It is estimated that 60-75% of the world's population is bilingual, but currently only around 30% of the population of Britain can make active use of a language other than English. However, the long-term effects of migration on language use and language change are debated. Academic studies are largely restricted to episodes of recent colonial and post-colonial Europe and the US. This project proposes to take a much longer-term view of the interaction between migration, colonisation, language use and literacy, by viewing interactions on a historical time-scale of over six hundred years.
The research project will be aimed towards three targeted groups of beneficiaries. Firstly, schools and teachers of all schools that teach UK citizenship as part of the National Curriculum will benefit from learning about historical examples of migration and ensuing linguistic diversity (Identities and Diversity is part of Key Stage 3 of UK Citizenship). Secondly, schools that teach courses on classical civilization, the ancient world or Latin language will benefit through enhanced learning about the history of the language and its cultural background. The first book of the Cambridge Latin Course, the most widely used textbook for teaching Latin in schools, is set in Pompeii - a Roman town in Southern Italy where Latin, Greek and Oscan were all in use, and this provides an entry point for school visits, talks and participation.
The third constituency is centred on, but not exclusively limited to, members of the public who go to museums, and /or who have an interest in ancient history, and / or who are interested in the history of languages and scripts. The British Museum exhibition on Pompeii and Herculaneum will open in March 2013, and hence before the start of this project, but it is hoped that it will generate interest in the culture and history of Southern Italy in antiquity that can be utilised by the project. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has good holdings of objects from Greek colonies in Italy, and will allow the project to make use of their changing display case in the Antiquities Gallery to illustrate some of the issues covered during part of the project lifespan, which will include links to the project blog and information of outreach talks to groups such as the Museum Friends and local Friends of Classics groups.
Dissemination to these targeted groups will take place through different media. We shall arrange school talks and visits, building on the Cambridge Classics Faculty's contact and outreach programmes with schools locally and nationally, and the PI's links with the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. The project will host a project blog (sample http://greekinitaly.wordpress.com/) with links to other web-resources in Classics, which will be publicised to schools and elsewhere. The blog will identify research findings and outputs which are suitable to different audiences, and will feature pod-casts of talks for both adult and school age audiences, and records of other outreach events.