Some socio-historical remarks on the Greek of imperial documents of the Palaiologan period

It is traditionally claimed that, starting from the Roman period, a dichotomy between a crystalised Attic ideal and the Koiné in all its heterogeneity quickly established a formal state of diglossia which continued until the twentieth century. A high-register, ‘Atticized’ variety, which users and audience learnt at school, is generally described as the one of literary, bureaucratic, and ecclesiastical texts, while a low-register variety as the one of spoken language, used for composing vernacular literature from the twelfth century on. Nevertheless, such dichotomy, though ideologically vital to the educated classes, was in reality largely theoretical.