ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed an exponential growth in the study of bilingualism, diglossia, and other phenomena related to language contact, and yet far too often academic discussion of language use in the ancient world fails to take account of the insights produced by such research. This paper is a preliminary attempt to investigate the nature and consequences of language contact in Syria and Mesopotamia during the late antique period, focusing particularly on evidence for Greek-Aramaic interaction. Evidence for this contact will be drawn primarily from the Greek and Syriac inscriptions of north Syria, bilingual Palmyrene inscriptions, and early Syriac literature, because each of these raises a number of distinct questions and theoretical issues.
