Yuliya Minets, University of Alabama
The present-day linguistic sensitivities render one’s native tongue, accent, or speech peculiarities as important aspects of their identity. A native language of a displaced person, an accent of an emigrant, or a special manner of speech typical of a certain local or social background are often among the most eloquent and truthful testifiers of who the person is, where they came from, and what they have been through. Yet, in the past as well as in the present, speaking with a distinct accent may come at a price, being in conflict with what is perceived as the norm in oral speech (White, “Why is Our Accent so Important to Our Identity?” Psychoprosody, September 10, 2013; Hanson, “Accent and Identity,” Compleat Links 4.3 (September 2007)).
While it is a truism to say that oral interaction is one of the most elusive phenomena in the study of Late Antiquity because historians, unlike modern sociolinguists, work solely with written sources (Papaconstantinou 2010), the references to someone’s speech peculiarities, accent, dialect, normative and sub-normative pronunciation in literary sources go some way towards compensating for the absence of oral evidence. Moreover, late antique writers could, and in many cases certainly did, express their own attitudes, concerns, fears, anxieties, or, by contrast, approval and appreciation when they referred to someone’s speaking (Minets 2022).
This paper will contextualize and analyze literary references to speakers with noticeable accents (foreign or dialectical) or speech peculiarities attested in works of late antique writers. I will focus on the remarks on pronunciation made by literati representing three different language traditions of the late antique Mediterranean (Greek, Latin, Syriac), when they referred to their own compatriots of various social, regional, religious, cultural backgrounds, genders, and ages, as well as to people coming from lands far away from the Mediterranean (Berber, Sub-Saharan, Germanic, and Aramaic groups, Irish, Persians, early Slavs, Arabs, people from Central Asia and beyond).
Late Antiquity is a crucial time of transition and transformation attested in many spheres of life, including the use of language. Due to demographical changes and the increasing levels of individual and group mobility, larger masses of the population had to become what we today would call second language learners. This, in turn, often resulted in the growing anxieties of the representatives of the old cultural elite (e.g., Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus, John the Lydian, Procopius, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville) trying to protect what they perceived as the norm. In some cases, the references to one’s speech peculiarities (foreign accents, regional dialects, etc.) functioned as rhetorical and ideological tools helping to construct differences, to dominate, to discriminate, and otherwise to perform power and authority in the communicative domains of politics, military, and religion, while the real power and authority of old elites were slipping away in the gradually disintegrating Roman world.
The approach will allow us to catch a glimpse of how speech differences and speech-related stereotypes were drawn into the process of constructing and negotiating intersectional local, social, ethnic, racial, and religious identities.