INTRODUCTION

The imperfect bilinguals or second-language learners who have been identified so far belonged largely to groups resident in areas in which two or more languages were in contact, such as the city of Rome. But language contact with its consequent bilingualism did not only take place in static populations.One environment, for example, in which speakers of different languages mixed together was the army; but language learning in the army is a topic in itself (see above, 5.VII.3).

Another group in any population who come into contact with foreign language speakers are traders purveying goods across language boundaries. In many cultures the trading classes have proved adept at acquiring enough of the foreign languages needed to carry on business, and there is no reason to think that Roman traders and their trading partners will have been any different. Language learning was no doubt a two-way process, in the sense that Latin-speakers wishing to exploit a province would have come into contact with provincial languages, and on the other hand provincial traders moving into Latin-speaking areas or dealing with Latin speakers will have picked up some Latin.

We have already seen one example of this second form of contact. The Greek-speaking Milesian slave-trader Aeschines (see 1.VII.2.3), while trading in the west, was required to write out in his own hand a legalistic document in Latin. It can be deduced from some of his misspellings that he was familiar with the sounds of substandard varieties of the Latin language.