ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 steps outside of the study of the Amarna Letters and makes the methodological argument that the study of linguistic variation in the Canaanite Letters necessitates engagement with sociolinguistic scholarship on code-switching and, specifically, works that address the challenges and complexity of linguistic and orthographic variation in written language. First, this chapter outlines the history of the study of code-switching in speech, and then it offers a synthesis of more recent work to refine the study of multilingualism and code-switching in texts.
