Dialectology (διάλεκτος), Ancient Theories of

Ancient Greek was fragmented into several local varieties down to the Hellenistic age, but for a long time both the term διάλεκτος diálektos (dialect) and study of the dialects lacked a systematic and scholarly dimension. After the advent of Koine – the first linguistic standard that Greece had – Greek scholars began to develop a ‘dialectology’ by systematically collecting rare words from local varieties of Greek, as well as from archaic and classical authors. The ancient dialectological approach, which started as an interest in the spoken varieties of Greek, later focused on literary use of the dialects and lacked, overall, a historical perspective: dialects were contrasted with each other in order to identify their peculiar elements, and Koine was treated as one of them (rather than as the linguistic standard). It was not until the Byzantine era that διάλεκτος diálektos acquired a meaning similar to the modern term, identifying a sub-entity of language.