Hellenismos and language variation

Abstract

With the term hellenismos the Greeks indicated primarily ‘Greek speaking’, as opposed to ‘Barbarian speaking’, and more specifically ‘speaking’ – and perhaps above all – ‘writing in good Greek’, according to the grammatical correctness and the appropriateness of style. The present contribution aims to retrace the definitions of hellenismos through their system of oppositions and, at the same time, explore the issue of dialectal variation from the perspective of ancient grammarians, integrating it with the modern discussion on the status of Greek dialects. Such a perspective is critical of a monolithic and invariant image of the Greek language, despite what we can get from the Byzantine koiné, and examines the consciousness of the Greeks themselves on the subject of variation and multilingualism.