La pratica della scrittura come forza sociolinguistica dinamica
La nascita e lo sviluppo di comunità di discorso italiane tra la tarda Antichità e il Medioevo, e il loro impatto sulle lingue e sulle società

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In narrative fiction and dramatic works written in English since the nineteenth century there are many examples of the representation of speakers of different social classes. Ancient Greek and Roman dramatic texts and narrative fiction also occasionally represent the speech of different social groups, including women, foreigners and freed slaves. In this paper I will present some of the evidence for social variation in the Greek and Latin languages that can be found in ancient literary texts, and compare this to other sources of information from the ancient world.

Literary texts that represent non-standard speech frequently include representations of the speech of some groups, but do not reproduce other types of variation, although they were probably also present in Athens and Rome. I will explore the reasons for this inconsistent representation of speech in this paper.