The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics ofHomer,ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in theEuropean canon. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. TheNew Testament of theChristian Bible was also originally written in Greek.[14][15] Together with theLatin texts and traditions of theRoman world, the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline ofClassics.
The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods:
Proto-Greek: the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered theGreek peninsula sometime in theNeolithic era or theBronze Age.[note 2]
Koine Greek (also known asHellenistic Greek): The fusion ofIonian withAttic, the dialect ofAthens, began the process that resulted in the creation of the first common Greek dialect, which became alingua franca across theEastern Mediterranean andNear East. Koine Greek can be initially traced within the armies and conquered territories ofAlexander the Great; after the Hellenistic colonisation of the known world, it was spoken fromEgypt to the fringes of India. Due to the widespread use of the Greek language during this period, a set of rules had to be established for the proper dissemination of the language. It is at this point that the term Hellenism (Ἑλληνισμός) first appears. Hellenism was used by the grammarians and Strabo to denote "correct Greek".[24] After theRoman conquest of Greece, an unofficialbilingualism of Greek andLatin was established in the city ofRome and Koine Greek became the first or second language in theRoman Empire. In the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, Rome refrained from imposing the use of Latin and instead communicated with its subjects in Greek, even in regions where Greek was not the predominant spoken language.[25] The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek because theApostles used this form of the language to spread Christianity. Because it was the original language of theNew Testament, and theOld Testament was translated into it as theSeptuagint, that variety of Koine Greek may be referred to asNew Testament Greek or sometimesBiblical Greek.
Distribution of varieties of Greek inAnatolia, 1910.Demotic in yellow.Pontic in orange.Cappadocian Greek in green, with green dots indicating individual Cappadocian Greek villages.[26]
Medieval Greek (also known asByzantine Greek): the continuation of Koine Greek up to the demise of theByzantine Empire in the 15th century.Medieval Greek is a cover phrase for a whole continuum of different speech and writing styles, ranging from vernacular continuations of spoken Koine that were already approaching Modern Greek in many respects, to highly learned forms imitating classical Attic. Much of the written Greek that was used as the official language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine.
Modern Greek (also known asNeo-Hellenic):[27] Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period, as early as the 11th century. It is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are severaldialects of it.
In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state ofdiglossia: the coexistence of vernacular and archaising written forms of the language. What came to be known as theGreek language question was a polarisation between two competing varieties of Modern Greek:Dimotiki, the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, andKatharevousa, meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki andAncient Greek developed in the early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth toStandard Modern Greek, used today for all official purposes and ineducation.[28]
The distribution of major modern Greek dialect areas
The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasised. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language.[29] It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, "Homeric Greek is probably closer toDemotic than 12-centuryMiddle English is tomodern spoken English".[30]
Geographic distribution of Greek language in the Russian Empire (1897 census)
Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizableGreek-speaking minority in Albania near the Greek-Albanian border.[27] A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to theGreco-Turkish War and the resultingpopulation exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed inTurkey, though very few remain today.[10] A small Greek-speaking community is also found inBulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizeableGreek diaspora which has notable communities in theUnited States,Australia,Canada,South Africa,Chile,Brazil,Argentina,Russia,Ukraine, theUnited Kingdom, and throughout theEuropean Union, especially inGermany.
Thephonology,morphology,syntax, andvocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to the modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it.
Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has onlyoral vowels and a fairly stable set of consonantalcontrasts. The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (seeKoine Greek phonology for details):
simplification of the system ofvowels anddiphthongs: loss of vowel length distinction, monophthongisation of most diphthongs and several steps in achain shift of vowels towards/i/ (iotacism).
development of thevoicelessaspiratedplosives/pʰ/ and/tʰ/ to the voicelessfricatives/f/ and/θ/, respectively; the similar development of/kʰ/ to/x/ may have taken place later (the phonological changes are not reflected in the orthography, and both earlier and later phonemes are written withφ,θ, andχ).
development of thevoiced plosives/b/,/d/, and/ɡ/ to their voiced fricative counterparts/β/ (later/v/),/ð/, and/ɣ/.
In all its stages, themorphology of Greek shows an extensive set ofproductivederivational affixes, a limited but productive system ofcompounding[37] and a richinflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in thenominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of thedative case (its functions being largely taken over by thegenitive). The verbal system has lost theinfinitive, thesynthetically-formed future, andperfect tenses and theoptative mood. Many have been replaced byperiphrastic (analytical) forms.
Pronouns show distinctions inperson (1st, 2nd, and 3rd),number (singular,dual, and plural in the ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), andgender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), anddecline forcase (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language).[note 3] Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Bothattributive andpredicative adjectivesagree with the noun.
The inflectional categories of the Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs havesynthetic inflectional forms for:
Many aspects of thesyntax of Greek have remained constant: verbsagree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns,adpositions are largely prepositional,relative clauses follow the noun they modify andrelative pronouns are clause-initial. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of themodern form of the language. Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks the infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language isverb–subject–object orsubject–verb–object.
Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number ofborrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks,[38] some documented inMycenaean texts; they include a large number of Greektoponyms. The form and meaning of many words have changed.Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin,Venetian,Ottoman Turkish andSemitic languages.[39] During the older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived fromSlavic languages,Albanian andEastern Romance languages (Romanian andAromanian).[40]
Greek is an independent branch of theIndo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may beAncient Macedonian, which, by most accounts, was a distinctdialect of Greek itself, related to theNorthwest Doric group.[43][44][45][46][47] Aside from Ancient Macedonian, current consensus regardsPhrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexicalisoglosses, with some being exclusive between them.[43][48][49][50] Scholars have proposed aGraeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated.[43][51][52][53]
Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related toArmenian (seeGraeco-Armenian) or theIndo-Iranian languages (seeGraeco-Aryan), but little definitive evidence has been found.[54][55] In addition,Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with otherextinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termedPalaeo-Balkan, and Greek has a central position in it.[56][57]
Inscription written using theLinear B syllabary on a tablet
Linear B, attested as early as the late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek.[58] It is basically asyllabary, which was finally deciphered byMichael Ventris andJohn Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor,Linear A, has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language).[58] The language of the Linear B texts,Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek.[58]
Another similar system used to write the Greek language was theCypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediateCypro-Minoan syllabary), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet.[59]
Ancient epichoric variants of the Greek alphabet fromEuboea,Ionia, Athens, andCorinth comparing to modern Greek
Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying thePhoenician alphabet, with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the lateIonic variant, introduced for writing classicalAttic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit a faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use ofink andquill.
The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase (majuscule) and lowercase (minuscule) form. The lettersigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word:
In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number ofdiacritical signs: three different accent marks (acute,grave, andcircumflex), originally denoting different shapes ofpitch accent on the stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks (rough andsmooth breathing), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and thediaeresis, used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave inhandwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of the acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained intypography.
After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplifiedmonotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system), is still used internationally for the writing ofAncient Greek.
In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as theano teleia (άνω τελεία). In Greek thecomma also functions as asilent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishingό,τι (ó,ti, 'whatever') fromότι (óti, 'that').[60]
Ancient Greek texts often usedscriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries.[61]Boustrophedon, or bi-directional text, was also used in Ancient Greek.
Greek has occasionally been written in theLatin script, especially in areas underVenetian rule or byGreek Catholics. The termFrankolevantinika /Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (becauseFrankos /Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe was under the control of theFrankish Empire).Frankochiotika /Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island ofChios. Additionally, the termGreeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications.[62]
Όλοι οι άνθρωποι γεννιούνται ελεύθεροι και ίσοι στην αξιοπρέπεια και τα δικαιώματα. Είναι προικισμένοι με λογική και συνείδηση, και οφείλουν να συμπεριφέρονται μεταξύ τους με πνεύμα αδελφοσύνης.[66]
Óloi oi ánthropoi gennioúntai eléftheroi kai ísoi stin axioprépeia kai ta dikaiómata. Eínai proikisménoi me logikí kai syneídisi, kai ofeíloun na symperiférontai metaxý tous me pnévma adelfosýnis.
Article 1 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."[67]
^The map does not indicate where the language is majority or minority.
^A comprehensive overview in J.T. Hooker'sMycenaean Greece;[22] for a different hypothesis excluding massive migrations and favoring an autochthonous scenario, see Colin Renfrew's "Problems in the General Correlation of Archaeological and Linguistic Strata in Prehistoric Greece: The Model of Autochthonous Origin"[23] inBronze Age Migrations by R.A. Crossland and A. Birchall, eds. (1973).
^The four cases that are found in all stages of Greek are the nominative, genitive, accusative, and vocative. The dative/locative of Ancient Greek disappeared in the late Hellenistic period, and the instrumental case of Mycenaean Greek disappeared in the Archaic period.
^There is no particular morphological form that can be identified as 'subjunctive' in the modern language, but the term is sometimes encountered in descriptions even if the most complete modern grammar (Holton et al. 1997) does not use it and calls certain traditionally-'subjunctive' forms 'dependent'. Most Greek linguists advocate abandoning the traditional terminology (Anna Roussou and Tasos Tsangalidis 2009, inMeletes gia tin Elliniki Glossa, Thessaloniki, Anastasia Giannakidou 2009 "Temporal semantics and polarity: The dependency of the subjunctive revisited", Lingua); seeModern Greek grammar for explanation.
^abBayır, Derya (2013).Minorities and nationalism in Turkish law. Cultural Diversity and Law. Farnham:Ashgate Publishing. pp. 89–90.ISBN978-1-4094-7254-4.Archived from the original on 14 October 2023.Oran farther points out that the rights set out for the four categories are stated to be the 'fundamental law' of the land, so that no legislation or official action shall conflict or interfere with these stipulations or prevail over them (article 37). [...] According to the Turkish state, only Greek, Armenian and Jewish non-Muslims were granted minority protection by the Lausanne Treaty. [...] Except for non-Muslim populations – that is, Greeks, Jews and Armenians – none of the other minority groups' language rights have beende jure protected by the legal system in Turkey.
^Adrados, Francisco Rodríguez (2005).A history of the Greek language : from its origins to the present. Leiden: Brill.ISBN978-90-04-12835-4.OCLC59712402.
^Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland The text of the New Testament: an introduction to the critical 1995 p. 52.
^Archibald Macbride Hunter Introducing the New Testament 1972 p. 9.
^Manuel, Germaine Catherine (1989).A study of the preservation of the classical tradition in the education, language, and literature of the Byzantine Empire. HVD ALEPH.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Peter, Mackridge (1985).The modern Greek language : a descriptive analysis of standard modern Greek. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-815770-0.OCLC11134463.
^Burstein, Stanley (2 November 2020)."When Greek was an African Language".Center for Hellenic Studies.The revelation of the place of Greek cultural elements in the lives of these kingdoms has been gradual and is still ongoing, but already it is clear that Greek was the official language of government and religion for most of their history.... Greek remained the official language of Nubian Christianity right to the end of its long and remarkable history.... But these three factors do suggest how Greek and Christianity could have become so intimately intertwined and so entrenched in Nubian life and culture by the seventh century AD that Greek could resist both Coptic and Arabic and survive for almost another millennium before both disappeared with the conversion of Nubia to Islam in the sixteenth century AD.
^"Greece".The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved23 January 2010.
^"The Constitution of Cyprus, App. D., Part 1, Art. 3". Archived fromthe original on 7 April 2012. states thatThe official languages of the Republic are Greek and Turkish. However, the official status of Turkish is only nominal in the Greek-dominated Republic of Cyprus; in practice, outside Turkish-dominatedNorthern Cyprus, Turkish is little used; see A. Arvaniti (2006): Erasure as a Means of Maintaining Diglossia in Cyprus,San Diego Linguistics Papers 2: pp. 25–38 [27].
^Crespo, Emilio (2018). "The Softening of Obstruent Consonants in the Macedonian Dialect". In Giannakis, Georgios K.; Crespo, Emilio; Filos, Panagiotis (eds.).Studies in Ancient Greek Dialects: From Central Greece to the Black Sea. Walter de Gruyter. p. 329.ISBN978-3-11-053081-0.
^Woodhouse 2009, p. 171: "This question is of course only just separable from the question of which languages within Indo-European are most closely related to Phrygian, which has also been hotly debated. A turning point in this debate was Kortlandt's (1988) demonstration on the basis of shared sound changes that Thraco-Armenian had separated from Phrygian and other originally Balkan languages at an early stage. The consensus has now returned to regarding Greek as the closest relative."
^Obrador-Cursach 2020, pp. 238–239: "To the best of our current knowledge, Phrygian was closely related to Greek. This affirmation is consistent with the vision offered by Neumann (1988: 23), Brixhe (2006) and Ligorio and Lubotsky (2018: 1816) and with many observations given by ancient authors. Both languages share 34 of the 36 features considered in this paper, some of them of great significance:... The available data suggest that Phrygian and Greek coexisted broadly from pre-historic to historic times, and both belong to a common linguistic area (Brixhe 2006: 39–44)."
^Obrador-Cursach 2020, p. 243: "With the current state of our knowledge, we can affirm that Phrygian is closely related to Greek. This is not a surprising conclusion: ancient sources and modern scholars agree that Phrygians did not live far from Greece in pre-historic times. Moreover, the last half century of scientific study of Phrygian has approached both languages and developed the hypothesis of a Proto-Greco-Phrygian language, to the detriment to other theories like Phrygio-Armenian or Thraco-Phrygian."
^Ligorio & Lubotsky 2018, pp. 1816–1817: "Phrygian is most closely related to Greek. The two languages share a few unique innovations,... It is therefore very likely that both languages emerged from a single language, which was spoken in the Balkans at the end of the third millennium BCE."
^Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017)."Graeco-Phrygian".Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
^Hugoe, Matthews Peter (March 2014).The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics. Oxford University Press. (Third ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-967512-8.OCLC881847972.
^HMML Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (27 July 2024).This month, "Greek Aljamiado" (i.e., Greek written in Arabic script) became one of the more than 90 languages identified in HMML's online Reading Room (vhmml.org). Greek Aljamiado was a common phenomenon among Byzantine-rite Christians in Arabic-speaking communities, but has been little studied. So far, 84 examples of Greek Aljamiado have been identified in HMML's collections of Christian manuscripts digitized in Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. Cataloging by HMML staff and associates makes these manuscripts easier to find, and supports scholars in their research of the extent and purposes of Greek Aljamiado usage. Pictured: Greek Aljamiado is written on the left page of this manuscript, in the collection of the Ordre Basilien Alepin in Jūniyah, Lebanon. View in Reading Room (OBA 00256):www.vhmml.org/readingRoom/view/120512 [Image attached] [Story update]. Facebook.[1]
^Kotzageorgis, Phokion (2010). Gruber, Christiane J.; Colby, Frederick Stephen (eds.).The Prophet's Ascension: Cross-cultural Encounters with the Islamic Mi'rāj Tales. Indiana University Press. p. 297.ISBN978-0-253-35361-0.The element that makes this text aunicum is that it is written in Greek script. In the Ottoman Empire, the primary criterion for the selection of an alphabet in which to write was religion. Thus, people who did not speak—or even know—the official language of their religion used to write their religious texts in the languages that they knew, though in the alphabet where the sacred texts of that religion were written. Thus, the Grecophone Catholics of Chios wrote using the Latin alphabet, but in the Greek language (frangochiotika); the Turcophone Orthodox Christians of Cappadocia wrote their Turkish texts using the Greek alphabet (karamanlidika); and the Grecophone Muslims of the Greek peninsula wrote in Greek language using the Arabic alphabet (tourkogianniotika,tourkokretika). Our case is much stranger, since it is a quite early example for that kind of literature and because it is largely concerned with religious themes."; p. 306. The audience for the GreekMi'rājnāma was most certainly Greek-speaking Muslims, in particular the so-calledTourkogianniotes (literally, the Turks of Jannina). Although few examples have been discovered as yet, it seems that these people developed a religious literature mainly composed in verse form. This literary form constituted the mainstream of GreekAljamiado literature from the middle of the seventeenth century until thepopulation exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Tourkogianniotes were probably of Christian origin and were Islamized sometime during the seventeenth century. They did not speak any language other than Greek. Thus, even their frequency in attending mosque services did not provide them with the necessary knowledge about their faith. Given their low level of literacy, one important way that they could learn about their faith was to listen to religiously edifying texts such as the GreekMi'rājnāma.
Alexiou, Margaret (1982)."Diglossia in Greece". In Haas, William (ed.).Standard Languages: Spoken and Written. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 156–192.ISBN978-0-389-20291-2.
Holm, Hans J. (2008)."The Distribution of Data in Word Lists and its Impact on the Subgrouping of Languages". In Preisach, Christine; Burkhardt, Hans; Schmidt-Thieme, Lars; Decker, Reinhold (eds.).Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Applications. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation e.V., Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, March 7–9, 2007. Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. pp. 628–636.ISBN978-3-540-78246-9.
Mallory, James P. (1997)."Greek Language". In Mallory, James P.; Adams, Douglas Q. (eds.).Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. pp. 240–246.ISBN9781884964985.
The Greek Language and Linguistics Gateway, useful information on the history of the Greek language, application of modern Linguistics to the study of Greek, and tools for learning Greek.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,The Greek Language Portal, a portal for Greek language and linguistic education.
The Perseus Project has many useful pages for the study of classical languages and literatures, including dictionaries.
^Venetian is either grouped with the rest of the Italo-Dalmatian or the Gallo-Italic languages, depending on the linguist, but the major consensus among linguists is that in the dialectal landscape of northern Italy, Veneto dialects are clearly distinguished from Gallo-Italic dialects.
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