ABSTRACT
In everyday spoken communication within multilingual contexts, it is the interplay between the speakers’ linguistic competence and their awareness of language behaviour acquired by social experience that allows them to spontaneously make the appropriate language choices. By contrast, language choice within written communication is not directed by spontaneous decisions, and does not even depend on the author’s own ability to master more than one language. Rather it is the result of premeditated consideration, depending on other conditions, and dealing with aspects other than direct communication. Considering that the exclusive benets of spoken communication, such as a shared context of space and time and with it the possibility of accompanying and connoting linguistic utterances with paralinguistic and kinesic signals are lacking,2 even
1 I would like to thank Andreas Kaplony (Zurich), Arietta Papaconstantinou (Oxford), and Petra Sijpesteijn (Leiden), who kindly read a dra of this paper, saved me from making a number of mistakes, and contributed a number of good suggestions. In addition to the abbreviations for papyri mentioned in the List on p. 000, this article also uses: P.BeckerPAF = C.H. Becker, ‘Arabische Papyri des Aphroditofundes’, Zeitschri für Assyriologie und verwandte Gebiete 20 (1907) 68-104; P.BeckerNPAF = C.H. Becker, ‘Neue arabische Papyri des Aphroditofundes’, Der Islam 2 (1911) 245-68.
