Goodbye Greek in Italy; hello Connectivity and Competition

This week marks the end of the AHRC-funded ‘Greek in Italy’ project. James Clackson, the PI of the project and my former PhD supervisor, has written a great post to mark the end of the project. He doesn’t just look back at what the project has achieved – quite a lot in four years! – but also looks to the future of our research, including an edited book deriving from this project coming out (hopefully within a year or so). If you’re interested in linguistics, multilingualism and ancient Italy, I’d really recommend a look back over the blog posts on that site – it’s a really great reminder of the past four years, and raises lots of questions for future research.

But as ‘Greek in Italy’ ends, another project begins – I’m pleased to announce that my new project ‘Connectivity and competition: multilingualism in Ancient Italy 800-200 BC’ will be funded by an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship from 2018-2020. This project builds a lot on the ‘Greek in Italy’ project, and on the previous research I did at the British School at Rome. I’m expanding my focus to look at case studies of language contact across Italy – I’m particularly interested in how communities might build links with each other, but also how people differentiate themselves from their neighbours using language. I’m hoping to look at both rural and urban sites using a whole variety of different languages, including some of the places I’ve discovered during my time on the ‘Greek in Italy’ project.

I’ve added a page over here if you want to know a bit more about the project and its activities – hopefully there will be a lot more to add from September!