Castles made of sand? balkan latin from petar skok to J.N. Adams

Abstract

Questions pertaining to the expansion, distribution, specificity and survival of Latin in the Danubian and Balkan provinces of the Roman empire have received much scholarly attention during the last hundred years. Four decades ago, in the ANRW volume dedicated to the state of research into the linguistic landscape of the Roman world, 1 Balkan Latin was given considerable space. Much of the earlier bibliography is to be found there; here I must mention but the two most important monographs – one by Petar Skok, 2 the other by Haralambie Mihăescu3 – which, despite differences, both represent wide-angle accounts of this phenomenon of linguistic and social history, the former book on a provincial, the latter on the regional level. Even today this kind of study is not completely out of vogue: Eugenia Beu-Dachin’s recent dissertation on Latin in Dacia is a good example.4 After so much work it surely is surprising to find that, in the authoritative study Jim Adams wrote on regional variation in Latin from early times down to AD 600, 5 the Balkan provinces drag behind almost every other area of the Roman empire in regard to the overall visibility and the individualisation of their Latin idiom.