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.