In this chapter I set out some aims and findings of the work, define some terms, and state some of the questions that will be addressed later. The types of evidence that will be used are described. I will also comment on methodology, but that will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters. Dialectal variation in other languages has been extensively investigated in recent years (and earlier as well), and I consider here the issues that have emerged in dialect studies and relate them to the Roman world. Most of these issues will come up later.

AIMS, METHODS AND FINDINGS

The attentive reader of Latin texts written between 200 BC and AD 600, the period to be covered here, will probably have a sense that the language changes in time, but no sense that texts could be assigned a place of composition on linguistic evidence alone. There have even been those who have taken the texts at their face value and argued that the language was a unity which did not begin to develop regional variations until the medieval or proto-Romance period (see also below, XI.1). But if so it is surely paradoxical that Latin should have spawned a diversity of Romance languages and dialects and yet had no regional varieties itself. The paradox has long puzzled scholars. The unitarian argument is at variance with all that is known about the behaviour of geographically widespread languages over time.