ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed an exponential growth in the study of bilingualism, diglossia, and other phenomena related to language contact, and yet often academic discussion of language use in the ancient world fails to take account of the insights produced by such research. This chapter investigates the nature and consequences of language contact in Syria and Mesopotamia during the late antique period, focusing particularly on evidence for Greek-Aramaic interaction. Most studies of bilingualism draw upon fieldwork conducted in regions of contemporary language contact, where the productive ability and communicative competence of speakers, the degree and nature of interference, the conscious or subconscious attitudes to the used languages, and the resulting diglossia, as well as the researcher's own theories, can all be examined and tested by repeated observation and the use of interviews and questionnaires. The linguistic diversity to be found in Syria and Mesopotamia during the late antique period can be illustrated by the texts discovered in Dura Europos.
