Multilingualism in Karia and the social dynamics of linguistic assimilation

The proximity of the Greek-speaking colonies along the coast of Asia Minor to the non-Greek communities of Karia had long created an environment of interaction between Karians and Greeks, and by the 4th century BC a level of bilingualism had been established in south western Anatolia. Under the rule of the Hekatomnids in the 4th century BC, Greek came to predominate as the language used in official documentation, while the Karian language disappears from the written record at some point in the 3rd century BC. Rather than considering the gradual spread of the Greek language in Karia solely in terms of the ‘Hellenization’ of the region, I will reconsider the social and political dynamics involved in the adoption of the Greek language by the communities of Karia. Starting from the foundation of the Ionian and Dorian settlements along the coast of Anatolia in the ‘Dark Ages’, and continuing down to the establishment of the Hekatomnid dynasty at the beginning of the 4th century BC, this paper examines how the involvement of the communities of Karia in the wider networks of the Mediterranean, and their incorporation into the Persian Empire, could have affected linguistic interaction and assimilation.