LatinNow (Q557)

This is an interdisciplinary project linking sociolinguistics, epigraphy and archaeology to write social history. Dramatic changes occurred linguistically in the north-western Roman Empire: a patchwork of local languages which existed in the Iron Age had been all but replaced by Latin as the dominant language by the end of the imperial period. Precisely how, when and why this change occurred, and how it relates to other social phenomena, remains an underexplored topic central to the Roman world and requires investigation which is only possible through an analysis cutting across provincial boundaries, and those between the Iron Age, Roman and early medieval periods, and reaching beyond Classics to modern sociolinguistics and Germanic, Celtic and Palaeo-hispanic studies.