Petronius uses many linguistic devices to characterise his narrative and the persons he describes, employing resources from the fields of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, code-switching, rhetoric and pragmatics; the only major linguistic possibility that he leaves underexploited is the description of pronunciation. Many studies of Petronius' language deal with the idiosyncrasies of his expressions, but the subject is still not fully understood, in part because his work is a literary creation that deliberately violates the literary conventions of classical Latin (see Adams 2005b: 77–8; Herman 2003: 139). The difference between this prescriptive or normative good literary Latin and the Latin of Petronius is notable. So, how can we define the language of Petronius?

The study of Petronius' language begins with the understanding that it varies both by genre (e.g. between dialogue and narrative) and by social context (e.g. between the speech of one character and another). Much has already been written on different aspects of this variation; here my aim is to examine a few specific usages and see what light they can shed on Petronius' linguistic and literary technique.

The Satyricon involves many different genres (see e.g. Petersmann 1977: 26; Callebat 1998: 10–2, 25–6; Biville 2003: 50–2), and Petronius writes according to his conceptions of the respective genres (oratory, epic poetry, tragic drama, derisive poetry) and also tries to use different registers for lower-class dialogue, middle-class dialogue, first-person narrative and, perhaps, ‘foreigner speak’.