Oxford Classical Monographs The Languages of Aristophanes

The play with linguistic styles constitutes an important ingredient of Aristophanic humour. Andreas Willi uses the stylistic diversity as a source to reconstruct the 'real' styles upon which Aristophanes based his text. Most of these 'real' styles would otherwise be lost because they are not represented in serious literature. By examining linguistic variation in Aristophanic comedy, Andreas Willi opens up a new perspective on intra-dialectal diversity in Classical Attic Greek. A representative range of registers, technical languages, sociolects, and (comic) idiolects is described and analysed. Stylistic and statistical observations are combined and supplemented by typological comparisons with material drawn from sociolinguistic research on modern languages. The resulting portrayal of the Attic dialect deepens our understanding of various socio-cultural phenomena reflected in Aristophanes' work, such as the spread of 'sophistic' culture, the re-evaluation of gender roles, and the status of foreigners in Athenian society.