Stephen Carlson wrote:Koine is not an artificial literary standard, like Wenyan. We have lots of documentary [non-literary?] papyri showing that the Greek of the New Testament for the most part is not terribly different from what people were speaking (or writing in private letters). ... You have to remember that texts in those days were not read silently but phrased and read aloud orally to listeners.
The Wenyan form of the language preserved an earlier form of the language is something that requires specialist study to master these days. It (along with the Imperial Examinations) more or less lost any influence under the Nationalist republic. The situation here was changed by a major social upheaval.
I assume that we are talking about the non-literary papyri found in Egypt. It is said that Middle Egyptian as a literary language underwent some changes during its history, but it wasn't until the Ramesside period (approx. the Exodus) that I can find any real differences. It is definitely closer to the Coptic written since the Ptolemaic period. It would seem that the extinction of Greek and the continuity of the Egyptian language in its venacular form (after the closing of the temples in 391AD) until the 10th or 11th century on a large scale (and in a few rare examples besides that), suggests to me that Greek was not accepted as a home language or a language of everyday communication within communities. In Palestine also, the reemergence of Aramaic (Syrian / Syriac / Assyrian) after Byzantine territorial losses to the Persians in the 6th and 7th centuries as a common language of communication (up until the forced Arabisation several hundred years later) suggests that Aramaic had been there as a spoken language all along, and at the very best there was an educated bilingualism. The only group that continued to use Greek as a language of home communication were the "Greek" communities of Lower (Northern) Egypt especially in Alexandria, which by now have all but left by immigration.
From what understand, it was the job of a scribe to hear what was said in the venacular, write it in Greek. The recieving scribe at the other end of the communication read it in Greek and spoke it out in the venacular of the place that he was in. The Coptic dialects up and down the length of the Nile and off into the Fayyum show us that the Coptic lanuage differed greatly within Egypt, and communicating with a person of a different ethnic group required a common language, and Greek filled that need.
That is different from the situation for peoples who remained "Greek" after the Battle of Manzikert (1071AD) where large populations of Greek speaking Christians found themselves suddenly under Turkish rule, and while Greek was initially retained as a language of communication between different ethnic communities in the area, that role was later taken over by what we now call Turkish. The Greek speakers retained their language, in some cases after forsaking Chrisitianity and following another faith.
My main point is that taking the disintegration of Greek as a language of interethnic communication as in indication as to its usage patterns in the pervious periods, one comes to the conclusion that Greek was not a home language for a large part of the people using it, and for some it was only a written language. The written record is useful to a point, but unless there is an assumed educational system as was in the case of Poland (Polish < German/Russian) and Denmark (<German), it is only the people in their homes and the everyday life of the community to carry the language through the unrecorded periods.
While of course in our modern age of learning by TPR and by speaking, speaking Koine Greek is a great and beneficial thing, and I myself intend to at least try to learn to do that soon, it may not have been the case in all given communities at all times.
Moreover, the only possible reference to speaking Greek, the tribune's Ἑλληνιστὶ γινώσκεις of Acts 21:37 leaves the linguistic situation ambiguous in that he does not say Ἑλληνιστὶ ὁμιλείς; but I guess what he meant was "Wow, you are talking to me (a Roman who doesn't understand Aramaic) in Greek.". I think that the written form was the dominant usage for Greek.