Hellenophones or barbarophones? Assessing Pamphylian intelligibility

"Hellenophones or barbarophones? Assessing Pamphylian intelligibility" is a webinar held by Eleonora Selvi on June 1oth, 2026, within the series ALPHA (Anatolian Linguistics, Philology, History and Archaeology), an academic lecture initiative organized within the ERC-funded project CAncAn – Communication in Ancient Anatolia (ERC Grant Agreement No. 101088363).

In this lecture, Eleonora Selvi investigates whether the Pamphylian Greek dialect — spoken in the cities of Aspendos, Perge, and Sillyon in the region of present-day Antalya, Turkey — would have been recognized as Greek by speakers of Attic-Ionic or Koine in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods. To address this question, the normalized Levenshtein Distance algorithm (LDN) is applied to Pamphylian epigraphic material for the first time, comparing the dialect's inherited Greek lexicon against Koine equivalents across the three longest surviving public inscriptions. The analysis yields an overall difference rate of 0.41 and a similarity rate of 0.59 — figures comparable to the phonological distance between Danish and Norwegian — while approximately 13.5% of the Pamphylian lexicon has no traceable Greek parallel whatsoever. The lecture argues that pervasive phonological weakening processes, compounded by Anatolian substratum and adstratum interference, would have rendered spoken Pamphylian largely opaque to a contemporary Athenian, qualifying its speakers as barbaróphonoi in the Strabonian sense — those who spoke Greek poorly — if not altogether áglossoi. These findings are situated within ancient Greek debates on linguistic identity, dialectal recognition, and the boundaries of hellēnismós, and the lecture reflects on the broader potential of perception-based, computationally grounded approaches for historical discussions of ethnicity and identity in antiquity.

Dr. Eleonora Selvi is a researcher in Greek epigraphy and Greco-Anatolian linguistics, currently based at the University of Trier, where she is working on a project on the technical language of inscriptions. She obtained her PhD from the University of Siena in 2024, with a thesis on linguistic and socio-cultural contact between Greeks, Anatolian peoples, and Greek-speaking communities in Pamphylia during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. During her doctoral research she was visiting researcher at the Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene and the École Française d'Athènes. She subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the University of Verona within a project on plurilingualism in ancient Anatolia, and was visiting researcher at the Centre for Language and Cognition of the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on Greek epigraphy and Greco-Anatolian languages, with a particular interest in the application of computational linguistics methods to ancient languages — an expertise she is further developing through a Master's in Data Science at Bocconi University.