Social identity, social meaning, and the dynamics of everyday writing in Roman and Late Antique Egypt

Recent studies of Ancient Greek have drawn attention to the social significance of linguistic choice. So far, however, surprisingly little attention has been paid to non-literary evidence: in the dry sands of Egypt, tens of thousands of ‘documentary’ texts have been preserved, ranging from scrap papers and shopping lists to marriage contracts and imperial edicts, which await further study. In this paper, I briefly introduce a research project aimed to analyze how such ‘everyday writing’ reflects aspects of social meaning. I argue that in relating language to its social context, the notion of ‘social identity’ is central. Social meaning is very complex, however, and not exclusively limited to social identity