The northern coast of the Aegean sea: a linguistic overview

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Recent archaeological and epigraphical surveys in the territory known as Aegean Thrace have brought to light new findings enhancing our knowledge in this area. New corpora of inscriptions, as well as prosopographical and onomastic studies, have been published in about the last 20 years. These contributions have boosted linguistic research on the different processes of language contact and acculturation that took place in this region. Additionally, further studies concerning Greek dialectology and the Thracian language have completed our previous understanding of the linguistic landscape of Aegean Thrace, but they have also challenged older tenets. Thus, this work attempts to provide an overall picture of the newly appeared linguistic evidence and an account of the linguistic approaches that this material has given rise to in modern scholarship.