The Third Level: A Reappraisal of the Byzantine Diglossia

Whereas most scholars refer to two levels of Greek in the Byzantine Middle Ages (the written register and the spoken language, sometimes identified with the label of Byzantine koine), the author advocates for the presence of a three-level scale forming a language continuum, whose extremes are represented by the Atticist or Classicizing Greek and the spoken regional languages, the middle position being held by an ever-growing Byzantine koine which was both written and spoken and functioned as the Empire’s lingua franca. The paper will summarily present the model in a sketch and discuss some textual evidence pointing to the awareness of contemporaries of the existence of a third level at the lower end of the scale. This third level was mostly neglected for being “barbarian” and “rustic” by Byzantine intellectuals who did not find its morphology and pronunciation to be compatible with the grammatical standards taught at the school and were also conscious of the regional fragmentation.