Épigramme et identité étrangère en Eubée : entre disparition des traits locaux et développement de langues de genre

This paper addresses the question of
how foreigners found a way to express their
diversity in inscriptional epigrams through
linguistic means (alphabet, dialect, adjectives
of provenance, etc.) across the centuries.
Ancient Euboea was chosen as a first
case-study. This region offers a sub-corpus
of 8 (funerary) epigrams for which the foreign
origin of the deceased is certain, out of
a total corpus of 38 epigrams. While in most
epigrams of the 5th century BCE alphabets and
dialects seem to provide a means to express
an identity associated with a specific locality,
in subsequent centuries specific epichoric features
disappeared and were not replaced by
other means of expressing origin and cultural
identity. In the Hellenistic age, as epigram
became a literary genre, dialects started to
be used as generic features. Although it was
then possible to use these dialectal features to
express an identity, there are no examples of
such a use in the corpus.