INTRODUCTION

Functional domains of languages and the difference between spoken and written language

In bi- or multilingual societies, the use of one or another language depends on a few basic parameters and a number of social variables which have been put together in the sociolinguistic concept of ‘functional domains’. Speakers can use, for example, one language within their families, another one in business affairs, etc. Empirical studies have brought to light typical clusters of functional domains, resulting from common speaker attitudes towards their languages, which can frequently be classified within a binary scheme as ‘Dominant’ vs. ‘Minority’ languages (see Table 17.1). These assumptions, reasonable as they are, have not yet been fully applied to the field of ancient bilingualism, where the use of a certain language is often simply taken as a shibboleth of a correlative personal identity. Although in some circumstances language use may indeed function as a claim of belonging to a societal group, or express a sense of identity with that group, we cannot draw conclusions from occasionally attested connections between persons and languages without taking the full range of their language options into account, including their spoken medium(s) too, which usually have to be guessed, or reconstructed.

In everyday bi- or multilingual spoken communication, it is the speakers' social competence, their acquired knowledge of language behaviour, which serves as an ‘intrinsic’ guide to more or less appropriate language choices, similar to the way in which they would choose certain lexical and/or phraseological means belonging to different registers of a single language in order to form stylistically different utterances, simply depending on actual circumstances of speech.