Connectivity and competition: multilingualism in Ancient Italy 800-200 BC

Before Latin came to dominate the peninsula from c.200 BC onwards, Italy was a highly multilingual environment, where multiple languages, dialects and alphabets interacted over many centuries. This interdisciplinary project will explore multilingualism in ancient Italy using an innovative comparative approach to shed new light on what written language can tell us about connections between communities, cities and regions.

Around 20 languages are attested in written form in ancient Italy, in stark contrast to the later dominance of Latin and Greek. This extent of multilingualism is not cross-culturally unusual (60-70% of the world's current population is multilingual), but the everyday impact of this is often forgotten by European and North American scholars living in monolingual societies.

By looking at how languages were used across the regions of Italy from c.800 to c.200 BC at different kinds of sites, this project will raise the profile of multilingualism as a key element of connectivity in the ancient world.

Using methods from modern sociolinguistics, historical sociolinguistics, epigraphy, history and archaeology, this project will examine inscriptions in languages including Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Venetic, Messapic and Latin. Unlike many studies, which treat these languages separately even when they occur at the same site, this project will look at inscriptions in their physical and cultural context.

Building on the methodologies that the PI has already established for working with fragmentary corpora, inscriptions will be considered at multiple levels: they will be read individually for linguistic and epigraphic detail, but they will also be studied by text type within and across regions. By investigating evidence at archaeological sites and museums, the project will look at how language was used in a particular time and place, and will consider the inscriptions' purpose and audience, rather than dealing with language in the abstract.

The project's urban case studies - in Campania (the Bay of Naples conurbation), Veneto (Este, Padua, Spina) and Latium (Praeneste, Caere, Capena) - each highlight a different aspect of language and dialect contact, but the multilingualism of these sites has never previously been compared to build up a detailed picture of Italy as a whole. Naples emphasised its Greekness to distinguish itself from its nearest neighbours, despite a diverse population very similar to 'Oscan-speaking' Pompeii's.

In Este and Padua, deliberate differences between the cities' alphabets show that written language was a key element of how the cities competed. The Veneto also participated in a highly interconnected Mediterranean, particularly through the nearby Etruscan port of Spina. In Latium, Praeneste and Capena sat between the Etruscan and Roman spheres of influence, and the sites' epigraphy gives us an opportunity to understand how writers reacted to this tension.

The rural case studies - Rossano di Vaglio, Pietrabbondante and Grotta della Poesia - are non-urban sanctuaries with inscriptions made by dedicants from across a wide area. At the maritime cult site of Grotta della Poesia, Messapic, Greek and Latin were all used at overlapping periods, resulting in a palimpsest built up using different languages and alphabets.

At Rossano and Pietrabbondante, the language used (Oscan) is more stable over the life of the sanctuary, but the effects of contact with Greek are still visible.

By bringing together evidence from these different sites, this project will build up a picture of multilingualism in ancient Italy and reach new insights about how multilingual individuals used their languages in different contexts. This ground-breaking project will therefore represent a step-change in our understanding of language use across pre-Roman Italy, expanding not just our linguistic knowledge, but transforming our historical understanding of connectivity in Iron Age Italy and the context into which Rome emerged.