235th Annual Meeting of the AOS (2025)

On Thursday, Apr 10, at 3:30 p.m. I gave a talk in the session Ancient Near East IV: Cross-Linguistic Interactions titled “The Sociolinguistics of the Canaanite Shift in the Amarna Letters.” The session was led by Anthony Yates of UCLA and included Marta Díaz Herrera (University of Chicago), Michael Leff (University of Texas at Austin), and myself. Here’s a summary of my talk (adapted from my abstract): “This paper offers a geographical and sociolinguistic analysis of the words evincing the Canaanite Shift in the Amarna Letters and other cuneiform texts from the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Previous scholarship has largely confined itself to brief mentions of the phenomenon, often providing only isolated examples without contextualization. This paper contextualizes the Canaanite Shift in the Amarna Letters within other contemporaneous cuneiform texts from the Syro-Levant. It also addresses a related set of questions: How widespread was the phenomenon, and what does it reveal about regional dialect variation? In what contexts do the forms showing the Canaanite Shift appear? Why do scribes choose to deviate from Akkadian forms in preference for Canaanite words? The paper argues that the Canaanite Shift was employed as a linguistic strategy by scribes to navigate multilingual and sociopolitical contexts. The choice to use native Canaanite words sometimes suggests a scribe’s lack of awareness of the Akkadian gloss, shedding light on the individual scribe’s level of education. In other instances, scribes intentionally break from the normative scribal code for rhetorical purposes, reflecting an awareness of how non-standard language asserts identity and heightens the personal nature of the message within diplomatic correspondence.”

Ultimately, I suggested, quite provocatively, that we need to rewrite the history of the Canaanite Shift based on the perspective of the second millennium cuneiform sources.