This chaper looks at the peculiar mixture of linguistic forms that are archaic and dialectal in Homer and compares them to the hybrid dialects that are employed in English-language popular music today. Sections 1 and 2 provide a detailed account of the main linguistic features of Homer’s Kunstsprache and separates its archaic components from its dialectal components. Section 3 looks at perceptions of dialect (and dialect imitations) in Archaic Greece. Sections 4-5 illustrate how ancient and modern critics interpreted Homer’s dialect, and introduces phase theory, along with remaining open questions therein. Section 6 introduces several contemporary case studies of singers adopting a non-native, hybrid dialect of English when performing. These include Adele, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Green Day, Alesha Dixon, the Arctic Monkeys, Iggy Azalea, and Keith Urban. Lessons won from these case studies are then applied to Homer.

One of the most prominent and seemingly most straightforward criteria used to distinguish different ethno-cultural groups or subdivide them further was the existence of a distinct dialect, to which the fifth chapter is dedicated. Because of the unrepresentative picture we get from the nature of the surviving epigraphic evidence, we cannot be sure whether some form of the Ionic dialect or accent continued to be spoken in the Roman period. Yet, the continued creative engagement with the Ionic dialect in the fields of historiography and medical writing by authors from all over the Greek world – and not only as imitations of individual canonical authors, but with a clear awareness that they were writing in Ionic Greek – shows that it maintained its very prestigious position as a traditional literary language and that it could still be considered as a meaningful cultural resource.

Our text of Homer uses a combination of dialects, indicating both that it couldn’t have been the native language of an individual speaker, and also that it must have evolved over a long period of time. Words from different dialects sometimes have different metrical values, allowing for great flexibility of expression.