Lably
Skip to content

Greek language

Indo-European language

  • 17 min read
  • 7 chapters
Regions where the Greek language is the official language - Greece and parts of Cyprus Where it is de jure and de facto official. (Republic of Cyprus and Greece). Where it is unofficially spoken.
Fobos92 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Related on Lably

Through Greeks, Italy and Balkans

Lab · Class 6–12Ancient Indian Ocean Trade

The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epic poetry of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics.

During antiquity, Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world. It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek. In its modern form, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora.

Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are highly-influential on the English language and remain the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary.

History

Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages.

Periods

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 the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age.
Mycenaean Greek
The language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards.
Ancient Greek
In its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire. Ancient Greek fell into disuse in Western Europe in the Middle Ages but remained officially in use in the Byzantine world and was reintroduced to the rest of Europe with the Fall of Constantinople and Greek migration to western Europe.

Language tree

The following tree is based on the work of Lucien van Beek:

  • Graeco-Phrygian
    • Greek
      • South Greek
      • North Greek
        • Aeolic
          • Boeotian (it also has West Greek features; precursor was possibly a bridge dialect between Aeolic and West Greek)
          • Lesbian (it also has at least one archaic South Greek innovation; precursor was possibly a bridge dialect between Aeolic and South Greek)
          • Thessalian
        • West Greek
        • Ancient Macedonian
    • Phrygian
Koine Greek (also known as Hellenistic Greek)
The fusion of Ionian with Attic, the dialect of Athens, began the process that resulted in the creation of the first common Greek dialect, which became a lingua franca across the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Koine Greek can be initially traced within the armies and conquered territories of Alexander the Great; after the Hellenistic colonisation of the known world, it was spoken from Egypt 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". After the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became the first or second language in the Roman 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. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek because the Apostles used this form of the language to spread Christianity. Because Koine was the original language of Christianity's New Testament, and the Hebrew Bible was translated into Koine as the Septuagint, that variety of Koine Greek may be referred to as New Testament Greek or sometimes Biblical Greek.
Medieval Greek (also known as Byzantine Greek)
The continuation of Koine Greek up to the demise of the Byzantine 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 as Neo-Hellenic)
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 several dialects of it.

Diglossia

In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia: the coexistence of vernacular and archaising written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarisation between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki, the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa, meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient 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 to Standard Modern Greek, used today for all official purposes and in education. The clash between Dimotiki and Katharevousa has sometimes been violent; renderings of ancient Greek or biblical works into vernacular Greek have come as far as to lead to the outbreak of riots – such as the Evangelika (Gospel riots) and the Orestiaka (Oresteia riots) – and even deaths.

Historical unity

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. 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 to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English".

Sign in to keep reading

6 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Language

LatinIndo-European language of the Italic branchAncient GreekAncient forms of the Greek languageArabicCentral Semitic languageSanskritAncient Indo-Aryan language of South AsiaFrench languageRomance languageGerman languageWest Germanic language