Graphemic Variation in the Romano-British Curse Tablets

The Latin language played a major role in linguistic changes, since it worked as lingua franca, replacing the patchwork of pre-existing local languages. It is important to understand the nature of these changes, by collocating them in their chronological and phenomenological frames. This kind of investigation is possible through a multidisciplinary approach, reaching beyond Classics to sociolinguistics. Among the disciplines involved in this research of non-literary documents, epigraphy and palaeography are our most important allies since they allow us to investigate the language whose speaker cannot be heard anymore. The analysis summarised in this paper has this specific purpose: we are dealing with written documents which are extremely relevant both for the content and for the practise of writing itself because they can give us relevant information about the linguistic changes according to a diachronic and a diastratic perspective for what concerns the curse tablets written in Roman Britain.