ABSTRACT
In a plurilingual society the use of a precise language is a choice that has a heavy signicance and a dened position within the sociopolitical situation. Oen the languages spoken in such a frame are used as political weapons. I shall present here an overview of the sociolinguistic situation of Ptolemaic and Graeco-Roman Egypt in the light of the documents that have come down to us, with a special focus on the question of the identity of the speaker and of the conscious choice of language in every real-life situation. It is clearly a daring aim, to try to reconstruct the conscience of a speaker, something that is so far away from written language.
