Call for Chapter Contributions

Multilingualism in the Ancient Greco-Roman and Byzantine Worlds

Between Theory and Practice

Bi-, Multi-, and Translingualism as Language Ecology

Submit an Abstract View Deadlines
Publisher Brill
Abstract Length 800 words
Abstract Deadline September 30, 2026
Contact bozia@ufl.edu

About the Volume

We are seeking chapter contributions for an edited volume to be published by Brill.

Multilingualism is not a recent phenomenon, yet its full complexity in the ancient and medieval worlds remains underexplored. Scholarship has tended to approach language contact through the lens of bilingualism — two languages, two systems, in structured relation — and to treat languages primarily as writing systems and textual artifacts amenable to formal analysis. What has received less sustained attention is the broader ecological reality: the ancient Greco-Roman and Byzantine worlds were environments in which bi-, multi-, and translingual practices conditioned and were themselves conditioned not only by literary production but also by social life and political positioning.

This edited volume proposes language ecology as its overarching framework (Haugen 1972; Halliday 1990). Rather than treating languages as discrete, bounded systems that come into contact, a language ecology approach understands them as living, interdependent entities shaped by the socio-political and cultural environments they inhabit and, in turn, shape those environments.

The volume asks:

  • What did it mean — cognitively, socially, literarily, and politically — to live and write within a multilingual ecology?
  • How did speakers and writers move across languages, dialects, and registers not merely as a matter of competence, but as a way of claiming, contesting, and inhabiting cultural and political space?

The volume aims to bring together researchers working across the ancient Greco-Roman world and the Byzantine Empire, with a deliberately broad methodological and source base. Contributions may draw on literary and non-literary texts alike — including lexica, grammars, private documents, inscriptions, and translations — since the distinction between “literary” and “non-literary” is itself one that this volume invites contributors to interrogate.

Crucially, the volume also opens a dialogue across time: we welcome scholarship that draws on frameworks from modern bi-, multi-, and translingualism research to illuminate ancient and Byzantine practices and, conversely, asks what the ancient record can contribute to our understanding of such practices today.

Topics and Questions We Invite

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Theoretical and methodological reframings: concepts from language ecology, sociolinguistics, and translingualism applied to ancient Greek, Latin, and their contact languages.
  • Non-traditional sources: lexica, grammars, glossaries, and translation practices as evidence of linguistic contact, negotiation, and ecological exchange.
  • Dialectal and register variation: variation within a single language as a dimension of multilingual competency and ecological repertoire.
  • Private and public writing: evidence for the multilingual repertoires of individuals and communities across the Greco-Roman and Byzantine worlds.
  • Dialogue between languages: code-switching, borrowing, and hybrid forms as purposeful ecological and social practice.
  • Language and contestation: how writers claimed, performed, or resisted linguistic and cultural identities within multilingual ecologies.
  • Byzantine multilingualism: Greek-Latin, Greek-Arabic, and other contact situations from Late Antiquity through the medieval period.
  • Sociocultural systems: how bi-, multi-, and translingual practices are embedded in — and constitutive of — broader social structures.
  • Reception and translation: ancient texts through translation as multilingual, intercultural, and ecological practice.
  • Cross-temporal perspectives: what modern bi-, multi-, and translingualism research reveals about the ancient and Byzantine record, and what antiquity offers in return.

Submission Guidelines

We welcome abstracts of approximately 800 words for contributions engaging with any linguistic, literary, historical, or theoretical dimension of the topics above. Interdisciplinary and cross-period proposals are especially encouraged.

Please send abstracts to Prof. Eleni Bozia at bozia@ufl.edu.

Timeline

September 30, 2026 Abstract submission deadline
November 30, 2026 Notification of acceptance
March 31, 2027 Full paper submission for peer review
September 30, 2027 Accepted and revised papers due

Co-Editors

Selected Bibliography

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