-.t
2
THB KOINE: A NEW LANGUAGE FOR
A NE,W STORLD
Stepben
Co/ain
1. The koine has traditionally proved a difficult notion to pin down. Pardy
this is owing to the fact that the ancieflt sourcesare themselvesconfused,
and I shall argue that such confusion qpically grows out of a iinguisric
environment characterizedby koine and diglossia.Modem studiessuggest
thag in cultures which employ a koine basedon a prestigious literary canon,
it is syrnptomaticof linguistic thought that it is focussedon the wriften
languageto such a degree that the telationship (historical and synchronic)
beween the spoken language(s)and the written languageis ignored or
misunderstood.One of the reasonsthat Westernscholarshiphas found it
difficult to unravel the linguistic culture of the postclassicalwodd is
ptecisely the dysfunctional relationship with language that was inhedted
ftom that wodd; a usethl way to sidestep the lens through which we view
the linguistic landscapeis to turn to modem linguistic studiesofparallels
from other cultures. \X/eshall look for a general model of how a koine
works in the context of ptestigious l.iterary and cultural heritage; for
although the Gteek koine is often supposed to have been a feature of
vetbal intetaction, we have in fact very litde evidenceabout the spoken
languagein the postclassicalGreek wodd. Modem stLrdiesmay provide
typological parallels to help us fill the gaps.
2. The polysemy attaching to the tefm koine can be structuted by shifting
the term from a purely linguistic domain to one where language, cultute
and politics coincide. In general the uncertainty suffounding the term koine
has two sources.Firsdy, the term was taken over by modern linguistics and
has been used in a variety ofways, none of which necessarilyreflectsthe
socialand historicalconditions surounding the 'original' koine. Secondly,
there has been litde consistencyin the way the term has been applied to the
linguistic situation of the ancient wodd.
For classicists the koine is the langrage associatedwith the new wodd
created in the easternMediteranean by the Macedonian hegemony, a
-)1
!
StepbenCaluin
wodd graduallytaken ovet and reunited by the Roman state.The starling
point is arbittadly, and not unreasonably,set at the end of the foutth
century BCwhen the Macedonian stateovetran the Grcek wodd, ftst undet
Philip II (died 336 nc) and then under Alexander. Thete ate reasonsto
believe that its linguistic forebear(s)had been crystallizing over the previous
two centuries,l but since the koine is a poJitical and ideological term as
much as a linguistic one, extending the term back in time would be
confusing and misleading.As the litutgical languageof the Greek church
'wasmore or less koine, and,had a lasting and ptofound effect ofl the
history ofthe Gteek language,it is far more difficult to assigna convenient
end-date;in practice texts later than Justinian (died ao 565) are rarely
quoted to illustrate koine (asopposed to Byzantine) Greek. We shall return
to this question at the end.
The tetm koine has passedinto modern linguisticsto mean a language
vatiety used over a wide area by speakerswho engagein levelling (the
levelling out of regional peculiarities) for the sake of communicational
implying somedegteeof institutiona.l
efficiency:a comptomise acrossdia-lects,
standardization.The wotd has been used to denote a variety of different
situations, but key ovedapping features2generally include the following:
i) a koine adses from related dialects (ot closely related linguistic
varieties)rather than from languageswhich are wholly distinct from
eachothet;
ii) levelling: it atisesfrom severaldialects,by a processin which local
peculiatities ate ironed out;
iii) it may be the result of dre transportation of relatedvatietiesto new
ptoximity in a new geographicallocation, or it may be due to a new
in an existingarea;
sociaJor poliricalcircumsrance
iv) it may become a litetary ot national standatd;it may become nativized.l
An implication of the aboveis that there ate likely to be identifiable stages
in the evolution ofa koine, eachmatked by salientcharacteristics
which do
not necessatilypertain to the whole l.ifecycleof the phenomenon. In
genetal the notion of koine implies a lingua franca, though the two are not
exactly equivalent and should not be confused (a lingua ftanca does not
imply a koine).
Ifwe considet the featureslisted above in the context of the Gteek koine
it may lead to some useful distinctionsbetweenthat situationand modern
usageof the tetm.
2.1 Firstly, the Gteek koine was 'common'in the sensethat it becamea
nationa.lstandatd,whete pteviously dialectaldiversity had existed.It was
not common in the sensethat the word seemsoften to havein a modetn
.'rz
Tbekoine: a newlangaagefora newworld
context, namely formed ftom the dialects by a (roughly symmetrical)
process of levelling. Some scholars of the modern er have assumed
that it did in fact arise from the straightforward mixing (linguisric
accommodation)of Attic, Ionic, West Greek, Aeolic, and (theoretically)
Arcado-Cypriot.They echo a stain of thought in the ancientgrammatical
tradition which assertedptecisely this (minus Arcado-Cypriot, which is not
a group the ancients recognised): compare, for example, a tematk recotded
in the scholiato Dionysius Thtax;
(aSCr Cn I, 3. 469(Or rheKoin):
Tuldggoor,vilru orir 6qeil.er,
rcorvri
Kol.€io0or,
dl,l"dplurri,ei nep{ rouvldnd
qappcrtov3pn}"ootpov
teoodpcov
olvdotlrcev'ori 1dp r{v 5udreoocrprov
rcalro),6EBl"elovrcrtrcrnpdgtotE l"dyowog
rouvlv roLotpev,dDd purcrriv.
rriv rouvr\vouvlorco0nrdr rriv rroodporv,rccrinpdgroutor,g,6tu pritnpri
ii ci,o)'r,ori
ror,vri'eL1cp ruEelnou6rr,6opuori,gcrpiv6tl rd rcorvdv
or-rro0,
6pro[coE,
lj iuori,,ii drrrruori.
Somesaythatif in factthe CommonDialectis composedof four elements
'common',but 'mixed'
[sc.Attic, Ionic, Doric, AeoJic]it shouldnot be called
'common',
- for rvedo not calla salvethat is madeof four drugs
but 'mlxed'.
And this is a good argumentagainstthosewho claimthat the Common
Dialectarosefrom a combinationof the four dialects;andtheyhaveanother
good argumentwhen they saythat the Common Dialectis the mother
'in theDoric
For ifsomebodyusestheexpression
[sc.ofthe otherdialects].
'in
commonDoric', andthe same
dialect',we saythat thisis equivalentto
for 'in Aeolic',or 'in Ionic', or 'in Attic'.4
The koine was,rather,an expandedand Ionicized form of Attic, which (at
least in its literary fotm) showed a small admlrture of lexical items that
appearpoetic from the petspectiveofclassicalAttic. This may be because
they wete Ionic in otigin, ot simply becauseof the artificia.l natute of the
literary koine: later u/riten drew on the lexical resourcesof the classical
past,and this sometimesincludedthe poets (especiallyepic).5It is the case,
however, that the Greek koine developedin a context of closelyrelated
dialects.To the extent that there waslevelling,this itoned out some ofthe
specifically Attic peculiarities of inflection, which led to a simplified
'Attic
morphological system.6An example of this is the teplacement of the
declension' in which the change o > 1 followed by quantitative metathesis
led to forms such as l"e6E,vet[Efrom ld6g etc. The koine 'reinttoduced'
l"o69from the non-Attic-Ion.ic dialects(and it was familiar from Homer).
The teatment of this in the later grammatical ttadition lumps it togethet
with a separatephenomenon, the wavering over the adoption of the Attic
inflection of zlstemnouns in placeof the non-ablautingpattern common
to the other dialects (including Ionic);
33
StepbenCalain
(b) Hdn. (Or tbeDecknsion
afNaun:) Gr Gr 7II,2.704-5:
oi llveror,rccr'Urrcolv
&Eu6v
dotr,Lttiosr 610noiov oitiov td Botg l3o6E
Arrlrlv toOo eigro r,l.€orwoiv elneiv6rl to drreivovrotd o eiEto t.l dri
oiov dcplg
rdrv rccrocpeu6vrrrrv
rcoird nopol"fllovgrovfeveig e percBoL?leu
69eorg,
ndi"r"g
n6l"uog
rol.eorg,vo6Evrtirg,l"o6El"eriE.
dQr.og
It is worth enquiring why boatfnom] - baos[gen.]is not affectedby the
Attic lengtheningof ato ,. One canstatethat thosecaseswhich lengtheno
following a vowel to a alsochangethis penultimatevowel to e,^s i7 aphr aphiar/aphedr,
sd1r/nedr,
/,ior/kd.
P,lir P0/i0r/p0/edr,
In the spoken languagethere can hardly have been any phonological
diffetence between 6puoEand dqer4 at this time. The distinction is
orthogaphic, and this is typical of the culture of the koine:
(c) (i) Hdn. (Ox Oxhograpb)
Gr Cr rt.2,432:
rcouvtlg.
oi )\rtlrcoioiv €tperfovrd ueige roi rd o tig ro
6orr.1dp6qr,g6qr,oE
rni dydvero
dqrr'4 rcain6l,eoE.
Speakersof Attic changed
...for in the common idiom it is ophit- apbios.
^nd.p1le,aJ.
the i to e and the oto d and theredeyelopedo4be1r
(c) (n) Hdn. (Partitiottu,'Categoies')
Botssonade201:
ri 6rdrotr <opeyol.our)"ivovrnlydp
dcplE,
rigrr'rg... i{tturc16ddotwri rclloug
'lorvrrcdrg
rllorv dvtdt
rousorsrcoi
6|,drot o lurKpoo'
6pogfpelgrriv Arrr.rc{v
K006lolypde€uv
€i.6e0rcv.
'.&te rnflectionwith long ais the Attic one;such.*'ordsarealso
a?bir- zphedr
inflectedin the lonic maonerwith a short o, Howevet,it is out normal
oracticeil wririnpto usetheAnic in0ecrion.
On the whole ,-stem nouns (like all third-declension masculine and
feminine nouns) endedup in a mergerwith the a-stemdeclensionin post'city'
classicalGreek, but traces ofan Atticizing inflection remain (n6i"1
can
have a gen. sing. n6l1g or ndl"ecr4
in the modern language: the lattet being
lessfrequendyused,but felt to be more coffect by speakers).7
In other casesthe compromise between Attic and Ionic led to fotms
which looked like dialect forms (West Gteek, Aeolic): thus Attic nporrrr,v
and Ionic np(ooerv'to do' resultedin a hybtid rpcooeuv,
which was identical
to the West Greek form. There were,indeed,someborowings from West
Greek in the koine: either for morphological reasonsof the tlpe noted
above, whereby the word )"odg'people' replaced an awkward Attic form
LerirE
(Ion. )"riog);or the unpredictable borrowings that all languagesengage
in. So, for example, Bouv6g'hill, mountain' entered mainstteam Greek from
the West Greek dialects(it was alreadyknown to Hetodotos).
The ancient tradition that the koine was a mixture of the old classica.l
dialectsmay have reflectedideasof identity in the new Hellenisticwotld.
34
I
Tbekoine:a newlangaage
for a newwa d
The new Greek wodd was both mixed and centalized, as opposedto the
independent and chauvinisticstatesof the eadierpedod; the new Greek
languagewas supposed to mirtot this shift in ethnic and political identity.
The view that the koine was a mixtute may also have been an oblique
reflection of the diglossic continuum that must have existed acrossthe
Greek speakingworld: spoken koine will have been a closet or futthet
approximation to dre written standard,dependingon the speaker'ssocial
status,level of education,and immediate communicational context, etc.
On the lower end of the continuum it will presumablyhave reflectedthe
historical speechhabits of the locality,including (at leastin the Hellenistic
period, and ptobably well beyond) dialect traits, as for example Strabo
8.1.2.33wtites on the Peloponnese:
(d) o1e6dv6'drurcqi.vtv rord nol'eig&1.),or,
&).lrr46ual61ovrol,
6orotou6i
6topi,(er,v
&novreg
6rd riv olpB0ocv€nurpdreucv.s
Evennow peoplespeakin differentwaysin thevariouscities,thougbthey
all appeatto speakin Doric (according
to the prevailingopinion).
The synchronic picture will have been one of the koine emerging out of
various dialect soupstowards a common panhellenicstandard.eSincedre
Greek grammadans (and this seemsoften to be part of the cultute of
diglossia) confused historical and synchronic telationships when they
thought about the five different qpes of Greek they recognized (Attic,
Ionic, Dotic, AeoJicand koine), it is easyto seehow it was legitimate,and
indeed appropriate,to conceive of the new panhelleniclanguageas one
which containedingtedientsftom the whole ofits classicalhetitage.Thete
is some evidencethat eady Attic attempts to 'appropriate' the koine (in
the senseof 'panhellenicstandard')causeditritation in this context. The
geographer Herakleides of Crete records a passagefrom Poseidippos
(dearbibusGrauiae3.7 = PCG 30) in which a character complains that the
Athenians criticize the way that othet Gteeks speak:
'EI),6g3orr,poprup€triLnv6 x(iv Kopt;lLdr6v
(e)6tr 5i rdoo flv rctlpu0pripe0cr
pepqdpevoE
noulrig Ilooelbunnog,
A0qvciorg6rr ujv ottriv pr,rv{vrcc'u
rr]v
pcoi,rfg 'Elr),c6oE
n6).r.v
fwou,l'dyrovoiirtug'
'El.),agp6v
dorupio, n6)'eug
6i n)rei.oveg.
or)pAvArrurci.(elg
fvir' d.vqov$v ),i11ug
crlro0rrv', oi 6"'Ei,),IveE
€)"l.Ivi(opev.
ypcppcor,v
ti npoo6r,orpi,Bcov
orl"l"oBolg
rccri
fiv eirparel,i,oveigd16i,cvd1er,g;
.,.thecomicpoetPoseidippos
showsusthatGteececomprises
alltheplaces
we haveenumerated,criticizing the Atheniansbecausethey saythat their
own dialectis Gteekandtheit oum city is Greece'Thereis only one Greece,
-)-')
StephenColain
but manycities.You speakAttic wheneveryou openyour mouth,andthe
restof us GteeksspeakGreek.Vtry makesucha fussover syllablesand
sounds,turningyout wit into unpleasanmess?'
The abi-lityof ancient grammarians to talk of the dialects as developments
of the koine (implied in passages(a) and (c) above, fot example) and at the
same time to talk as though they wete historically eadier is surptising to
but this flexible apptoach to historical
modern linguistic sensibilities:1o
anteriority and genetic priority has parallels. Dante, in De rulgti ekquentia
(ca- 1303 5) undertakes investigation of where and how the Italian
'illustrious vernaculat'
Qwlgreillustre)was to be identified. Dante sometimes
talks of the ualgareillustreas something which could be cteated out of the
'putification'
vemacular Italian dialects (by a similar processoflevelling and
that createsa koine):
illuire, cardinale,
aulicaru
etmialeualgarc
(f) Itaque,adeptiqrcdqaerebanas,
dicimas
vidttur,etqaansni.ipaliau gaia
in l*tia, qaodandt lat'ieciuitatire.ttetnt lis.resre
t r etpanderant/4r
etcanPararh/r.
omniaLatinorarymensura
So we havefound what we wete seeking:we can definethe illusffrous,
cardinal,aulic,and curialvemacularin Italy asthat which belongsto every
Italian city yet seemsto belong to rione, and againstwhich the vernacular
weighed,and compared.
of all the citiesof the Italianscan be measured,
(DI/E 1.16,tt. Botterill)
At other times Dante taJksof the illustreas prior to the dialects, a standatd
from which they have declined( ptoto-Italian' in the words of Mazzocco
1993,138);in 1.10-11 he is explicit that the languageofrl had split from a
single language (unanldiana) to many vemaculzts (multa ualgaria).It is a
patefamiliasamong the dialects (just as in (a) above the koine is the
'mothet').
Researchinto languageattitudes among speakersof modern Arabic gives
some insightsinto the origins of this uncertainty.Speakersof Arabic ate
speakersofa modem Arabic vernaculat, a tange ofwhich spreadacrossthe
Arab wodd, and which are not, unless contiguous, mutually intelligible at
'lowest'level. Insofar as educatedspeakersalso know Modern Standatd
the
Arabic (mote or less a variety of the classicallanguage)they beLievethis to
be their mothet tongue. The vernacular has a low psychological awareness:
speakersmay deny that they speakit, and may think of it (if at all) as a
casual or debasedvariety of the standard, rather than as a histotical
descendant of that standard (the modetn linguistic view). It is likely that a
similar lingristic culture prevailed in the wodd of the koine.l1
2.2 In the modem wodd some of the koines that have been identified are
the result of the transportation of related languagesto a new geographical
36
!
Thekoine:a newlangragefora newworLl
location: this was especially common in the context of slavery and
indentured labout in the New nflodd. Others have grown out of a new
socialor political circumstancein an existingarea,for exampleas a result
of the rise of nation statesencompassingmultiple dialect varieties.The
ancientGreek koine flourishedin both of thesesituations.It startedin the
'old' Greek wodd, whete its toots go back at leastto Athenian intellectual
dominance following the Persian wars of 490-80 Bc (and arguably much
eatlier, given the influence of Ionic in archaic Gteece as a result of the
'Ionian enlightenment'). During the fifth century oc
Homeric text and the
Athens becamethe dominant cultural and political force in the Aegean;
the Athenian empire made Athens a hub of trade and military activity, with
a high degreeofinteraction between Athenians and theit Ionian allies;there
is no doubt that the cosmopolitancharacterof the city left its mark on the
languageof the working utban population. This vatiety may be dubbed
'PiraeusAttic' o\ ing to its associationwith trade and the lou'est classof
Athenian citizen, who sewed in the nar.y which made the city powerful.
The 'Old Oligarch' (ps-Xenophon,l th. Pol.2.7-B) complainsabout this;
@) 6unriv dpXrivrtg 0ol.drr1Errp6rov ptv rp6rorg etiorlu6vdlliipov
cprovlvndocv drotoweE dleldlcvro
6rupr,o16pevor
61,),1r,
&i.l.or,6...tneurc
"E)"}"1veE
i6lot pdLi'ovrci. Qovr1L
roiiro piv 6rcTiE,rotro 6i drcrfg' rcoioi pdv
dl dnovrowr6rt
rccl6r,a[rqr,
rcclolrjpor, lpdvr<ru,A0lvcriou6t rcerpap6vll
'Ei"),{vovKol
|30ppdp(,v.
By virtue of their nava.lsuptemacythe Athenianshavemingledwith various
hearingeverykind of
peoplesanddiscoveted
all sortsofdelicacies...futthet,
language,theyhavetakensomethingftom each;Greekson thewhole ptefer
to usetheirown language,
wayoflife, andqpe ofdress,but theAtheruans
usea mixture from all the Gteeksandbatbarians.
Attic poetry and prose had alwaysbeen heavily influenced by lonic, and
there is evidencethat in the secondhalf of the fifth century the educated
6lite stattedto adopt some Ionic idioms in speech.The new international
Attic was apparendyadopted as the official languageof the Macedonian
court in the fourth cefltury Bc, as the expansionist Macedonian kingdom
sought to position itself fot a leading tole in Greek affairs. Sinceit had
become the languageof education and literary prose, it was a natural choice
as a pan-Hellenicmedium of administrationand lingua francawhen most
ofGreece fell under Macedonianconttol in the last decadesof the cennrry.
However, that is only half the story of the koine. As the Macedonians
expandedinto former Persian teritories in Anatolia, Eg]?t, the Levant
and the Near East the koine was exported as the medium of
communication at all levels. These new Macedonian subjectswere not
(with the exception of coastalAnatolia) pteviously Gteek speakets,and
37
StepbenColain
the dynamicsof the koine must have been very diffetent in theseregions.
Thete was greater potential for simplification and regularization of Greek
morphology, since the language was spreading tapidly as a contact
language.There was no question here of a continuum between koine
Gteek and the speaker'sown dialect indeed,the conceptofnativization of
the koine (say, on the part of speakerswhose parents wete mixed
Macedonian/Gteek and local) is more straightforward in the 'new'
territories,where local Gteek substratewas not a complicatingfactor. We
predict, therefore, a relative\ high degteeof nativization in the 'new' Greek
wotld; while at the same time throughout the Hellenistic wotld the literary
koine becamea 'national' written standard.
3. It is important to arrive at a definition of what we mean by the
Hellenistickoine in the presentdiscussion:pardy so that if others disagree
with our suggestions,they will at least be able to see cleady where they
disagtee.
Fot the Hellenistic wodd what I think we need to decide fitst of ali is
this: What kind of spacedo we want to locate the languagein? Vas it a
written language?A spoken one? Or an absttactentity?All of thesehave
been suggestedby important scholatswho haveworked in the field.l2The
answers to these questions will affect our decisions concerning the
chronologicalextensionof the koine: whether, for example,it is sensible
to suppose that the languageof the third century nc has much significantly
in common with that of the fifth centufy AD.When we havereachedsome
conclusions about the definition of the koine proper, then we can ask:
to \r/hat extent was koine a new thing? That is to say,was there koine (or
indeedkoinal in the Greek wodd before 320 BC?The term koine, as we
have seen,has a range of meanings:to anticipatemy answerI think that
there were important koinai before Alexander which were diachronically
essential for the constitution of the Hellenistic koine: but that the
Hellenistic koltne wasnew, and of a different order from anything which
had precededit.
3.1 The tetm koine has often been used to denote the whole of
postclassicalGreek. This would include at least three varieties of the
language:i) the colloquial varietiesspoken acrossthe Greek wodd, ii) the
fotmal written Greek of prose authors, and iii) the informal language of
documentarypapyri,etc. (In fact the first category,spoken Gteek, is likely
to include many disparate regional and social varieties, to which we shall
retum.)
Lingr.ristsare generally interested in the history of Greek, and a common
way of approaching koine Greek is to examine both litetary and non-
38
Tbekoine: a newlangaagefora newwa d
litetaty documents, but especially the latter, for clues regarding the
developmentof the spokenlanguage.But this approachdoes not specify
which spoken languageis in question: it wotks on the assumption that
there was a spoken languagewhich was the essenceof Gteek, and other
varietiescan be explainedin terms of it. So, fot example,a ptose author
writes in a language approximating to an eadier stage of the spoken
language,but it may show signs of intetference from the writer's own
idiom. The problems with this are fusdy that the undedying model captures
few of the interestingfeaturesofthe wodd of the koine, that is to say,the
linguistic cultute of the Hellenisticwodd; and secondlythat it may lead to
misleading conclusions about the development of Greek: for example, that
a certain feature was slowly dying from the spoken language between the
third century ec and the second century an, while the truth is that the
feature was gone from the vernacular very shortly after the end of the
classicalpetiod.
It seemsto me that the notion of koine Gteek does have a useful role
to play in undetstandingthe linguistic cultute ofthe Hellenisticwodd: its
polysemy can be beaten back, and its vatious manifestations can be
otganized and related by an adjustment to the undedying languagemodel,
namelyby supposingthat the koine cannot be identified in any particular
wdtten document, or in anything that emetged ftom the mouth of a Greek
speaket,fotmal or informal. It is an abstractconcept (though not abstract
to the language users),which expressesthe linguistic and cultutal identity
of the speaker: that ts to say,Hellenismos.Incasethis sounds rathet vague,
the paraliel I want to consider is mod em Atabic Spracbbunl,
where speakets
acrossa wide areawith many mutually unintelligible vernaculats, ate united
Iinguisticallyand psychologicallyby the senseof being Atabic speakers,
and by a wtitten superstructurewhich is Qur'inic and classicalAtabic. If
we look to Arabic for a model to undetstand the Greek koinel3 we are
immediately tempted by a new working definition: on the analogy of
standardArabic we can saythat for our purposesthe koine constrtutes2
standardto which no spoken ot written variety coffesponds exacdy.It is
a theoretical entity \r/hich reflects the feeling of speakersabout theit
Jinguisticidentity: adhetenceto the'standard'in this caseis a positive
statement, not the result of coercion. Another parallel would be the
Lain/Romance continuum before the appeatanceof the national languages
from the foutteenth century: but since this, like the Greek koine, is a
Jinguisticwodd that has disappeared,it is mote use{irlto startwith Arabic,
where modern socioLinguistic
studiesoffer a wealth of suggestiveparallels.
The koine, on this model, refers to a situation of stablediglossia.The
tetm diglossiawas introduced into academiclinguistic discourse (Ferguson
39
Stqben Aluin
1959b) n an effort to describe a situation which is essentiallyaLiento
Western thought about language:linguists have used the tetm ever since
while arguingabout what it meansand criticizing Fetguson'sfirst attempt
to apply it (to Arabic). It describesa linguistic cultute which has a distinct
'High' form of the language, deriving ultimately from a canonical corpus:
in the caseof Arabic, the consciousnessof speaketsthat they are Arabic
speaketsis the result of the canonizationof the languageof the Qur'An as
'Arabic'
tout s:imple,
and (as in Greece) the subservienceof grammatical
activity to textual exegesis. The 'Low' form of the languageis the everyday
vemacular.Fergusonwas criticisedfor failing to recognisea continuum of
speechstylesbetween these two poles: nevertheless,diglossiais a usefi.i
shotthand fot tefering to a specific tlpe of linguistic culture.
The developmentofa sensein the Greek world that thereexisteda body
ofcanonical 'texts' by the end of the fourdr century \r/asa vital factor in the
subsequenthistory of Gteek. It would be a mistake to supposethat the
koine spread solely because it was the Macedonian language of
administration, or becausea new variety of Attic, which we may call
expanded or international Attic, had developed over the course of the fifth
and fourth centuries (this is the languagethat the Old Oligarch complains
of, perhaps around the year 425):without the undetpinning of koine it
would have been just one mo{e lingua franca that perished when the
conditions which gave rise to it changed.The panhellenic textpar excellence
was of course Homer, and the Ionic flavour of the vulgate may indeed
have contributed to the intemational clout oflonic (though it can hardly,
as some have suggested,be the main reason for the spread of the
Hellenistic koine). The use of the term koinai to desctrbepoetic ttaditions
such as epic is well established.But the nelv canon, the one instrumental
in setting the stagefor the Attic basedkoine, was the body of litetature
which emerged after the Persian v/ats in the context of Athenian poiitical
and cultural pre-eminence;and in particular,the statusof Ionicized Attic
as the languageof fotmal ptose (documentary or litemry) and education.
This was the situation which, hand in hand with the Macedonian
adoption of the new Attic as a lingua franca, resulted in the peculiar
linguistic and cultural circumstance that we call the koine. The two factors
ate intertwined: neither could have done it without the other. This is all by
way of preface to tetuning to the Arabic model. I think that we have litde
ptospect of retrievingthe spokenvemacularsof the Hellenisticwo d, the
languagecoresponding to Fetguson'sI-ow variery since speakersof the
Low vadety do not read or write. I seeno reasonto believe that the old
dialectsdisappearedin the Hellenistic and Roman periods,nor indeed the
local languagessuch as Lycian. They certair y stopped being written; and,
40
Thekoine:a newlanguage
for a nervvorld
as in the caseof modem Arabic vetnaculan, may very soon have become
more or lessmutually unintelligible when spoken by people with no degree
ofeducation or exposureto utban life (manywomen, for example).Even
if we suppose that the new substandardvernacular did teplace the old
dialects,itwould very soon havesplit into radicallydifferent idioms across
the Greek wodd. However, Classicists(as opposed to Linguists)are not
particulady interested in these Low varieties.V41at\/e want to know is
what the €lite were speaking,and we assumethat they at any rate had no
difficulty communicatingwith eachother. I think this assumptionis tight,
and we can turn again to Atabic to consider some of the intermediate
registetsthat have been proposed, in the hope that they can infotm our
speculationon the situationin the Hellenisticwotld.
Although a continuum has by its very nature an infirite number of levels,
some scholars workng on Arabic have concluded that it is helpful to
identify two levels between the Classicallanguageand the vernaculars
(which are the only two uncontroversial levels).Details and tetminology are
disputed, but in genetal there is a recognisedneed to integrate an importa"nt
datum into the diglossicframework:namely,the fact that'educatedAtabs
of most nationalitiestalk among themselveson most topics with litde or
no linguistic embaffassment,simultaneouslydrawing asthey do so on the
resourcesof the written languageand of tegional vernaculats' (Mitchell
1980,89). That is to say,while otal Litenry Anbic (OI-A) is relativelytate,
and confined to the most formal of situations, thete is a lower-level process
of stylistic modification which consists, essentially, of levelling or
classicizing.Levelling is the suppression of localisms, and classicizing
denotesrecourseto the use of widely undetstood featuresof the classical
language(the two ovetlap, of course). This idiom is now widely tefetred to
'middle'
asEducatedSpokenArabic (ESA), the
speechof educatedArabs;
'high-flown' and (at the
on Mitchell's model this speech style avoids both
'stigmatized'
variants; it contains within it a range of
opposite pole)
possibiLitiesthat may be labelled formal or infotrr,d., catefirl ot casual,etc.
It is worth noting that dialect convergence (sometimescalled koineizing)
is not symmetrical:fot example,it is reported that Eg]?tians rarely adopt
this strategy,sinceEgyptian Arabic is so widely understood (the result of
the concentrationof the film industry and other popular mediain Eglpt).
Educated Spoken Arabic is built on a basically vernaculat structure
(Meiseles1980):nevertheless,
the boundarybetweenthis and Oral Literary
Arabic is unstable. Distinguishing features include lexical differences,
including certain conventiona.l indicators such as the affi.rmarives na'am
(High) vs. 'a1wa(Low); sentence structure (obviously connected with
morphology, which is in tutn connectedwith phonology); and the use of
41.
StEhenColuix
matked categoriessuch as the dual. Gteek parallelswould not be hatd to
suggest, especially since phonological change must haye rendered
ambiguous some important morphological categories (such as the dative
and even the accusative).For example,Btixhe (1987,21) has pointed out
that in the vetnacular of Tetmessos (Pisidia) in the thitd century AD
epigraphic data indicate that both ripelEand rlpetgwere [imis]. These sound
changesare likely to have occurred a good deal eadier in most spoken
varieties of Greek;l4 presumably the vernacular had reorganized the
personalptonouns so that fi.rnctiona.ldistinctions wete maintained (compate
modetn Greek epelEeoeiE).
Thete remainsthe inttiguing possibility that at
the highest end of formal communication in the koine period ('Otal
Literary Greek') some elements of a classicizing pronunciation were
adopted when this was necessaryto maintain functional differences
(compate also the indicative and optative verbal endings l.r-rer
versus l,ror,).
One could imagine*ris i-ndeclamarion,
Forexample.
Motpurgo Davies (1987) showed that the Gteeks in the dialectal
divetsiqr of the Classicalpetiod had the idea that they were speakingGreek.
They did not contrast 'Gteek'with the dialectsthat they spoke, sincethe
dialectscollectivelyconstitutedGreek.In the koine petiod to speakGreek
(tli"1vi,(er.v)
meant to have the requisite Gteek education to be able to
participate in the new Greek world: to be able to read and write the formal
languagewithout barbaitmosor rcloikismos.The formal languagewas now
contrastedwith the (classical)dialects:dris is interestingfor two reasons.
Firsdy, there is a new distinction between 'Greek' (the standard language)
and the dialects;and secondly,the grammariansdo not contrast the standard
languagewith the vernaculars.The vernacularis not recognised:it does
not extstEtalangtage, is not a proper object of study.The sameis true of
the Arab wodd, and the mediaeval Latin wodd. The relationship between
the standatd and the vetnacular, which in linguistic tetms would be viewed
asdiachronic (the one is a later stageof the other), is conceivedin synchronic
tetms: all speaketsview the standardas theit mother tongue, and to the
extent that they think about the vetnaculat, it is viewed as a cortupted,
informal version of the former. In the Gteek situation the classicaldialects
are acceptable:not normative,but the ptopet object ofattention and with
a limited function (for example,in certain forms of litetature).
Hete it may be usefulto considetthe vexedquestionof the changefrom
Latin to Romance,whete the iink between linguistic consciousnessand
written standard seemsto have played a cenffal role.ls To name a linguistic
vatiety is to make an ideological choice which is likely to have social ot
political implications: Latin turned into Italian when speaketsstopped
calline it Latin shordv after Dante establisheda new written standard.
Thekoine:a newlangaagefara newwo d
Langtage naming seems always to have been intimately connected with
the creation of a wdtten vadety. Dante had called Lain Crammatica,and,
Itall,zn Latina:16he 'did not regard Latin as the origin of the popular
languages,but rather he apprehendedit as a common way of writing,
unaffected by dialectal diffetences' (Janson 2002, 123). In the caseof
Greek there was no renaming, and no wide\ acceptedwritten standatd
(ot standards) until the modern era (t-hatis to say,no written standard that
was ftee from the anxiety of classicism).In the modern era thete is, of
course,a standard,though the quarrel between putism and the modern
languagewas setded relatively recendy, and speaketsare ambivalent about
'modern
the adjectivein the term
Greek'.
To retutn to the chronological extension of the koine: although its roots
can be seen in the history of Athens after the Persian wats, and the
intellectualpreeminenceof Ionia befote that, the linguistic culture of the
Hellenisticwo d is the resultofa new socialand political realiry and koine
reflectsthis. It is hard to speci!' the petiod at which the Linguisticculture
had changed to such an extent that one has to recognze the end of this
koine: there is a sensein which it continued until the modem pedod. But
the movement known asAtticism may be a pointer: by this time the koine
has become stigrnatizedinawzy that is alien to the eatly period, when
tiete was no sensethat the common languagewas inferior to the Attic
dialect. The return to Attic seems to be indicative of a new set of
distinctions; perhapsbetween the leisured classwho had time to master
the Attic dialect, and the rest of the Greek-speakingwodd; rathet than
betweenthe Greek-speakingwodd and the others.
Notes
1See,e.g.,L6pezEire 1993.
' Forwhichcf. Siegel1985,360.
3 i.e. it may become the first language for a gtoup ofspeakets.
a The argument seems to be that as 'Dotic'is the genus of which the individual
Dodc dialects are the species,so the koine bears d-resame telation to the foui Greek
dialects (and cannot thetefore be composed ofor derived ftom them). Tlrrs mitors
the telation between panhellenic Gteek identity and (for example) Athenian ot Spanan
citizenship. My translation mosdy follows that ofConsani 1993, 35 {.
\ So alsoDante
QleV gai Eloqaeftia2.1.7) arguesthatwriters ofptose most oftefl
leatn the koine (for him, dte wlgare ilbtte) ftom poets.
6 Whethet this is evidence that the koine had features in common with a creole is
difficult to say; arguments on this subject have perhaps not distinguished clearly
enough between the written and the vernacular language. Certainly the ancient
gtammatical obsession with'analogy' and 'anomaly'as forces in language starts to
Iook intetesting in this tegatd.
43
StepbenCaluin
7 Honocks'1997,219-20.
3More evidencefor the persistenceof Doric at Dio Chrysostom (2"dcent. AD), O,:
1. 60.
t So Consani1993,34-5: '...lesdialectesanciensont exerc6,avant de disparaitte
ddfinitivemenq une action complexe qui a ptoduit des formes diversifi€es de koin6
patl1e.'
10SeealsoConsani1993,35-7.
lrThe parallelberweenthe Greek koine and modern Asbic hasbeen dtawn by
Ferguson19594Versteegh1986,Bubenik 1989,10-17 and others.
12'C'6taitpour eux
[rr. les anciens]le dialecteemployd par des prosateursde
l'6poquehell6nistiqueou imp€rialecomme Polybe,Strabonou Plutarque',Meillet
(1,929,253);'Lalang'te
parl€e,dansdescirconstances
exigeantun stylesurveilld,pat
l'aristocratie des cit6s grecquesou hell6nis6esdu d6but de notre dre est donc la seule
i m6dter vdritablementle nom de koin6', Brixhe 1987,22; 'En d6finitive, la seule
langue qui mdrite t6ellement le nom de koin6 est le regstre sup6rieur de la langue
€ctite',Btixhe and Hodot 1993,20, cf. alsoBrixhe 2010.
13Suggestedalreadyby Versteegh 2002 and others.
1aHottocks (1997, 105 7) tentatively following the reconstruction ofTeodonson
1978.
]s Seethe essaysof Lloyd,
Jansonand Wright in Wright 1991b.
16Thorgh tn De dgai eloquentia
the term granmalicarefers to any literary language
(induding classicalLatin and Greek)whose rules have to be leamedby instruction aod
application: 'non nisi per spatium temporis et studii assiduitatemtegulamur et
doctinamw it tlla', Dl/E 1.3.
Editions
Dante
De auQai elaquettia. Edtted and translated by Steven Botterill,
Cambridge,2005.
Boissonade I . F. Boissonade,Hendiani Paftitiones,London, 1819.
Cr Cr
CranmaticiCraeti-1,1t Dioryti TbracbAr graumaticaed. G. Uhlig; I,3:
Scboliain Diorysii TltracitArtea grannatican rec. A. Hilgard; II, 1-3:
Apalllr,ii Ibrelli qtae Wetunt rec. R. Schneider et G. Uhlig; III, 1-2:
Hemdiani hchaici reliEtaacoll. A. Lentz; IV,1-2: Tbeodosii
Alexandini
Canones,GeoryiiCltoembooiScholia,SopbmtiiAlexandini Exerpta rcc.
A. Hilgatd; Leipzig,1867-1910.
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