LATE AND VU LGAR LAT IN IN MUS LIM SPA IN: THE AFR ICAN CONNE CTION

abstract

This series of triennial international conferences has become a valuable and enjoyable showcase for the presentation of research, ideas, information and data concerning the topic that intrigues us all; the nature of Latin as a living language, as a spoken language, as the first native language of millions of human beings from its earliest recorded moments up to the Early Middle Ages. The combined knowledge and experience of those who come to these meetings is unusually wide, because our field of operations covers a thousand years and more, relying on data which extend over wide areas of the Western Mediterranean and elsewhere, on archaeological evidence such as inscriptions and defixiones, on textual evidence such as manuscript errors and glosses, on the explicit comments of grammarians and other writers, on the reconstructions made by the comparative-historical method, on the discoveries and analyses of historians working on Roman, Late Antique or Early Medieval history, and on the theoretical evidence provided by modern advances in several areas of linguistics, including pragmatics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and indeed historical sociolinguistics.