Ancient Palestine Is Multilingual and Diglossic: Introducing Multilingualism Theories to New Testament Studies

Abstract

This article surveys some key works that address in one way or another the linguistic situation of ancient Palestine. It also examines that linguistic situation by way of introducing several multilingualism theories from the field of sociolinguistics, specifically explaining and demonstrating how they are pertinent to the investigation of the available linguistic evidence. The objectives are to show that previous studies that have utilized multilingualism theories have not yet been able to apply them either adequately or appropriately to the linguistic evidence, that use of multilingualism theories is the way forward to assess the available linguistic evidence, and that the linguistic situation of ancient Palestine must have been ‘multilingual and diglossic’.

Keywords

language ancient Palestine multilingualism sociolinguistics linguistics Aramaic Hebrew Greek diglossia code-switching social domains language varieties and proficiency

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