The linguistic variation of Latin in Roman Britain

The present thesis aims to record sociolinguistic variation in the non-literary texts written on tablets found in Roman Britain (1st-4th century CE) showing the differe 'micro-histories' of Latinization from this province. In general, the term ‘non-literary’ pinpoints documents like personal correspondence, private communication, lists, reports, curses and documents written on different writing materials like papyrus, ostraka, tablets or stone. For Roman Britain, the writing tablets written on wood (whether wax or ink-written tablets), represent the expressions of a single individual or community of speech situated in a precise geographical space between the first and third centuries. The main corpora considered in this analysis are the Londinium-Bloomberg tablets (Tomlin 2016), the Carlisle writing tablets, the Vindolanda writing tablets and the Curse tablets. The rest of the documents written on tablets will compose the corpus that I have labelled as ‘Other’. The case studies analysed in this thesis are the following: vowel merger, syncope, gemination, degemination, h- insertion and deletion in initial position.