ABSTRACT
Crosslinguistic influence-or the influence of a person’s knowledge of one language on that person’s knowledge or use of another language-is a phenomenon that has been of interest to laypeople and scholars alike since antiquity andmost likely ever since language evolved. One of the earliest references to language contact, bilingualism, and crosslinguistic influence comes from Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus tells Penelope about the “mixed languages” of Crete. Due to widespread multilingualism in the ancient world, instances of crosslinguistic influence abound in a variety of ancient texts, ranging from epitaphs and personal letters, to legal and commercial documents, to religious and literary treatises (Adams, Janse, & Swain, 2002). These texts also offer evidence of negative attitudes towards the phenomenon of transfer (another term for crosslinguistic influence), such as derogatory remarks about “speakers of bad Greek” made by ancient writers and philosophers, including Homer, Herodotus, and Flavius Philostratus. In fact, Janse (2002) argues that the negative term barbarians and its derivatives were commonly used to refer not only to speakers of languages other than Greek but also to foreigners speaking “bad Greek” or, in our contemporary terms, foreigners exhibiting first language transfer.
