Greek language

For the Greek language used during particular eras, see Proto-Greek language, Mycenaean Greek, Ancient Greek, Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, and Modern Greek.

Greek
Ελληνικά Elliniká
Pronunciation	[eliniˈka]
Native to	Greece Cyprus Albania (Gjirokastër County and Vlorë County) Italy (Calabria, Salento and Messina) and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, Black Sea coast, Asia Minor and Eastern Mediterranean
Ethnicity	Greeks
Native speakers	13.5 million (2012)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Graeco-Phrygian (?) Hellenic Greek
Early form	Proto-Greek
Dialects	Ancient dialects Koine Medieval Modern dialects
Writing system	Greek alphabet
Official status
Official language in	Greece Cyprus European Union Akrotiri and Dhekelia
Recognised minority language in	Albania Argentina Armenia Australia[2][3] Hungary Italy (Apulia and Calabria) Romania Turkey[4][5][6][7] Ukraine United States[8] Russia[9]
Language codes
ISO 639-1	el
ISO 639-2	gre (B) ell (T)
ISO 639-3	Variously: ell – Modern Greek grc – Ancient Greek cpg – Cappadocian Greek gmy – Mycenaean Greek pnt – Pontic tsd – Tsakonian yej – Yevanic
Glottolog	gree1276
Linguasphere	56-AAA-a 56-AAA-aa to -am (varieties)
Areas where Modern Greek is spoken (Dark blue represents areas where it is the official language.)[note 1]

Greek (Modern Greek: Ελληνικά, romanized: Elliniká, [eliniˈka]; Ancient Greek: Ἑλληνική, romanized: Hellēnikḗ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy (in Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records.^[10] Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years;^[11][12] previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.^[13] The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.

The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics 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.^[14][15] 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.^[16] It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek.^[17] 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 the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary.

Idealised portrayal of the author Homer

History

Main article: History of Greek

Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC,^[18] or possibly earlier.^[19] The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC,^[20] making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language.^[21] Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages.

Periods

Proto-Greek-speaking area according to linguist Vladimir I. Georgiev

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.^{[note 2]}
• Mycenaean Greek: the language of the Mycenaean civilization. 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 civilization. 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.
• 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 colonization 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".^[24] 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. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek because the Apostles used this form of the language to spread Christianity. Because it was the original language of the New Testament, and the Old Testament was translated into it as the Septuagint, that variety of Koine Greek may be referred to as New Testament Greek or sometimes Biblical Greek.

Distribution of varieties of Greek in Anatolia, 1910. Demotic in yellow. Pontic in orange. Cappadocian Greek in green, with green dots indicating individual Cappadocian Greek villages.^[25]

• 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):^[26] 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

Main article: Greek language question

In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia: the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization 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.^[27]

Historical unity

The distribution of major modern Greek dialect areas

The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasized. 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.^[28] It is also often^{[citation needed]} 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".^[29]

Geographic distribution

Further information: Greeks and Greek diaspora

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 sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near the Greek-Albanian border.^[26] 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 the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey, though very few remain today.^[10] A small Greek-speaking community is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and throughout the European Union, especially in Germany.

Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, in what are today Southern Italy, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, and Libya; in the area of the Black Sea, in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia, Monoikos, and Mainake. It was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms, for most of their history.^[30]

Official status

Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population.^[31] It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English).^[32] Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages.^[33] Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë.^[34] It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Greek is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine.^[35] It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.^[4][5][6][7]

Characteristics

See also: Ancient Greek grammar, Koine Greek grammar, and Modern Greek grammar

The phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary 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.

Phonology

Main articles: Modern Greek phonology, Koine Greek phonology, and Ancient Greek phonology

Spoken Modern Greek

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 only oral vowels and a fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts. The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details):

• replacement of the pitch accent with a stress accent.
• simplification of the system of vowels and diphthongs: loss of vowel length distinction, monophthongisation of most diphthongs and several steps in a chain shift of vowels towards /i/ (iotacism).
• development of the voiceless aspirated plosives /pʰ/ and /tʰ/ to the voiceless fricatives /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 with φ, θ, and χ).
• development of the voiced plosives /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ to their voiced fricative counterparts /β/ (later /v/), /ð/, and /ɣ/.

Morphology

In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes, a limited but productive system of compounding^[36] and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in the nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive). The verbal system has lost the infinitive, the synthetically-formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood. Many have been replaced by periphrastic (analytical) forms.

Nouns and adjectives

Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual, and plural in the ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (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. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun.

Verbs

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 have synthetic inflectional forms for:

	Ancient Greek	Modern Greek
Person	first, second and third	also second person formal
Number	singular, dual and plural	singular and plural
tense	present, past and future	past and non-past (future is expressed by a periphrastic construction)
aspect	imperfective, perfective (traditionally called aorist) and perfect (sometimes also called perfective; see note about terminology)	imperfective and perfective/aorist (perfect is expressed by a periphrastic construction)
mood	indicative, subjunctive, imperative and optative	indicative, subjunctive,[note 4] and imperative (other modal functions are expressed by periphrastic constructions)
Voice	active, medio-passive, and passive	active and medio-passive

Syntax

Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree 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 and relative 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 the modern 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 is VSO or SVO.

Vocabulary

Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks,^[37] some documented in Mycenaean texts; they include a large number of Greek toponyms. The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian, and Turkish. 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 from Albanian, South Slavic (Macedonian/Bulgarian) and Eastern Romance languages (Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian).

Loanwords in other languages

Further information: English words of Greek origin and List of Greek and Latin roots in English

Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics, physics, astronomy, democracy, philosophy, athletics, theatre, rhetoric, baptism, evangelist, etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as a basis for coinages: anthropology, photography, telephony, isomer, biomechanics, cinematography, etc. Together with Latin words, they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin.^[38][39]

Classification

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian, which, by most accounts, was a distinct dialect of Greek itself.^{[40][41][42][43]} Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses, with some being exclusive between them.^[40][44][45] Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated.^{[40][46][47][48]}

Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian) or the Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan), but little definitive evidence has been found.^[49][50] 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 other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan, and Greek has a central position in it.^[51][52]

Writing system

See also: Greek Braille

Linear B

Main article: Linear B

Linear B, attested as early as the late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek.^[53] It is basically a syllabary, which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A, has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language).^[53] The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek.^[53]

Cypriot syllabary

Main article: Cypriot syllabary

Greek inscription in Cypriot syllabic script

Another similar system used to write the Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-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.^[54]

Greek alphabet

Main articles: Greek alphabet and Greek orthography

Ancient epichoric variants of the Greek alphabet from Euboea, Ionia, Athens, and Corinth comparing to modern Greek

Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet, with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic 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 of ink and quill.

The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase (majuscule) and lowercase (minuscule) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word:

upper case
Α	Β	Γ	Δ	Ε	Ζ	Η	Θ	Ι	Κ	Λ	Μ	Ν	Ξ	Ο	Π	Ρ	Σ	Τ	Υ	Φ	Χ	Ψ	Ω
lower case
α	β	γ	δ	ε	ζ	η	θ	ι	κ	λ	μ	ν	ξ	ο	π	ρ	σ ς	τ	υ	φ	χ	ψ	ω

Diacritics

Main article: Greek diacritics

In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs: three different accent marks (acute, grave, and circumflex), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on the stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks (rough and smooth breathing), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis, 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 in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of the acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography.

After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic 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 of Ancient Greek.

Punctuation

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 the ano teleia (άνω τελεία). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι (ó,ti, 'whatever') from ότι (óti, 'that').^[55]

Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio 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.^[56] Boustrophedon, or bi-directional text, was also used in Ancient Greek.

Latin alphabet

Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script, especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics. The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe was under the control of the Frankish Empire). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios. Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications.^[57]

The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy.

Hebrew alphabet

The Yevanic dialect was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet.^[58]

Arabic alphabet

In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado, some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet. The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina. This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant (Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria).^[59] This usage is sometimes called aljamiado, as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet.^[60]

Example text

Greek pronunciation

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek:

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.^[61]

Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet:

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 the Universal 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."^[62]

See also

• List of medical roots, suffixes and prefixes

Notes

1. The map does not indicate where the language is majority or minority.
2. A comprehensive overview in J.T. Hooker's Mycenaean 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] in Bronze Age Migrations by R.A. Crossland and A. Birchall, eds. (1973).
3. 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.
4. 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, in Meletes gia tin Elliniki Glossa, Thessaloniki, Anastasia Giannakidou 2009 "Temporal semantics and polarity: The dependency of the subjunctive revisited", Lingua); see Modern Greek grammar for explanation.

Footnotes

1. Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
   Ancient Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
   Cappadocian Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
   Mycenaean Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
   Pontic at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
   Tsakonian at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
   (Additional references under 'Language codes' in the information box)
2. 2006 Census Table: Language Spoken at Home by Sex – Time Series Statistics (1996, 2001, 2006 Census Years)
3. Αυστραλία: Τηλεδιάσκεψη «Μιλάμε Ελληνικά τον Μάρτιο»
4. Tsitselikis 2013, pp. 287–288.
5. Toktaş, Şule (2006). "EU enlargement conditions and minority protection : a reflection on Turkey's non-Muslim minorities". East European Quarterly. 40 (4): 489–519. ISSN 0012-8449. p. 514: This implies that Turkey grants educational right in minority languages only to the recognized minorities covered by the Lausanne who are the Armenians, Greeks and the Jews.
6. Bayır, Derya (2013). Minorities and nationalism in Turkish law. Cultural Diversity and Law. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. pp. 89–90. ISBN 978-1-4094-7254-4. 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 been de jure protected by the legal system in Turkey.
7. Questions and Answers: Freedom of Expression and Language Rights in Turkey. New York: Human Rights Watch. 19 April 2002. Archived from the original on 20 October 2023. The Turkish government accepts the language rights of the Jewish, Greek and Armenian minorities as being guaranteed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
8. "Language Use in the United States: 2011" (PDF). United States Census. Retrieved 17 October 2015.
9. "gree1276". Council of Europe. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
10. "Greek language". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 29 April 2014.
11. Haviland, William A.; Prins, Harald E. L.; Walrath, Dana; McBride, Bunny (2013). "Chapter 15: Language and Communication". Anthropology: The Human Challenge. Cengage Learning. p. 394. ISBN 978-1-285-67758-3. Most of the alphabets used today descended from the Phoenician one. The Greeks adopted it about 2,800 years ago, modifying the characters to suit sounds in their own language.
12. Comrie, Bernard (1987). The World's Major Languages. Routledge (published 2018). ISBN 978-1-317-29049-0. ... the Greek alphabet has served the Greek language well for some 2,800 years since its introduction into Greece in the tenth or ninth century BC.
13. Adrados, Francisco Rodríguez (2005). A history of the Greek language : from its origins to the present. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-12835-4. OCLC 59712402.
14. Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland The text of the New Testament: an introduction to the critical 1995 p. 52.
15. Archibald Macbride Hunter Introducing the New Testament 1972 p. 9.
16. Malkin, Irad (2011). A small Greek world : networks in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199734818.001.0001. ISBN 9780199918553.
17. 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.
18. Renfrew 2003, p. 35; Georgiev 1981, p. 192.
19. Gray & Atkinson 2003, pp. 437–438; Atkinson & Gray 2006, p. 102.
20. "Ancient Tablet Found: Oldest Readable Writing in Europe". Culture. 1 April 2011. Archived from the original on 25 July 2021. Retrieved 20 January 2022.
21. Tulloch, A. (2017). Understanding English Homonyms: Their Origins and Usage. Hong Kong University Press. p. 153. ISBN 978-988-8390-64-9. Retrieved 30 November 2023. Greek is the world's oldest recorded living language.
22. Hooker 1976, Chapter 2: "Before the Mycenaean Age", pp. 11–33 and passim
23. Renfrew 1973, pp. 263–276, especially p. 267
24. Zacharia, Katerina, ed. (2008). Hellenisms: culture, identity, and ethnicity from antiquity to modernity. Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-7546-6525-0. OCLC 192048201.
25. Dawkins & Halliday 1916.
26. "Greek". Ethnologue. Retrieved 12 April 2020.
27. Peter, Mackridge (1985). The modern Greek language : a descriptive analysis of standard modern Greek. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-815770-0. OCLC 11134463.
28. Browning 1983, pp. vii–viii.
29. Alexiou 1982, p. 161.
30. 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.
31. "Greece". The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
32. "The Constitution of Cyprus, App. D., Part 1, Art. 3". Archived from the original on 7 April 2012. states that The 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-dominated Northern 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].
33. "The EU at a Glance – Languages in the EU". Europa. European Union. Archived from the original on 21 June 2013. Retrieved 30 July 2010.
34. Bytyçi, Enver (2022). In the Shadows of Albania-China Relations (1960–1978). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 20. ISBN 978-1-5275-7909-5. Albania's official language is Albanian, but in municipalities where minorities reside, the languages of these minorities are also used, including Greek in several municipalities in Gjirokastra and Saranda, and Macedonian in a municipality in the East of the country.
35. "List of Declarations Made with Respect to Treaty No. 148". Council of Europe. Archived from the original on 10 April 2020. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
36. Ralli 2001, pp. 164–203.
37. Beekes 2009.
38. Scheler 1977.
39. "Πόσο "ελληνικές" είναι οι ξένες γλώσσες". NewsIt. 18 November 2019.
40. Olander 2022, pp. 12, 14; van Beek 2022, pp. 190–191, 193
41. 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. ISBN 978-3-11-053081-0.
42. Hatzopoulos, Miltiades B. (2018). "Recent Research in the Ancient Macedonian Dialect: Consolidation and New Perspectives". 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. 299. ISBN 978-3-11-053081-0.
43. Babiniotis 1992, pp. 29–40; Dosuna 2012, pp. 65–78
44. 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."
45. 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)."
46. 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."
47. 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."
48. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Graeco-Phrygian". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
49. van Beek 2022, pp. 193–197
50. Renfrew 1990; Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1990, pp. 110–116; Renfrew 2003, pp. 17–48; Gray & Atkinson 2003, pp. 435–439
51. Olsen & Thorsø 2022, pp. 209–217; Hyllested & Joseph 2022, pp. 225–226, 228–229, 231–241
52. Holm 2008, pp. 634–635
53. Hooker, J. T. (1980). Linear B : an introduction. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. ISBN 978-0-906515-69-3. OCLC 7326206.
54. "Cypriot syllabary". Britannica Academic. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
55. Nicolas, Nick (2005). "Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation". Archived from the original on 6 August 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
56. Hugoe, Matthews Peter (March 2014). The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics. Oxford University Press. (Third ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-967512-8. OCLC 881847972.
57. Androutsopoulos 2009, pp. 221–249.
58. "Yevanic alphabet, pronunciation and language". Omniglot. Retrieved 18 April 2020.
59. 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]
60. 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. ISBN 978-0-253-35361-0. The element that makes this text a unicum 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 Greek Mi'rājnāma was most certainly Greek-speaking Muslims, in particular the so-called Tourkogianniotes (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 Greek Aljamiado literature from the middle of the seventeenth century until the population 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 Greek Mi'rājnāma.
61. "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". ohchr.org.
62. "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". United Nations.

References

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• Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2009). "'Greeklish': Transliteration Practice and Discourse in a Setting of Computer-Mediated Digraphia" (PDF). In Georgakopoulou, Alexandra; Silk, Michael (eds.). Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited. pp. 221–249.^{[permanent dead link‍]}
• Atkinson, Quentin D.; Gray, Russel D. (2006). "Chapter 8: How Old is the Indo-European Language Family? Illumination or More Moths to the Flame?". In Forster, Peter; Renfrew, Colin (eds.). Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages. Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. pp. 91–109. ISBN 978-1-902937-33-5.
• Babiniotis, George (1992). "The Question of Mediae in Ancient Macedonian Greek Reconsidered". In Brogyanyi, Bela; Lipp, Reiner (eds.). Historical Philology: Greek, Latin and Romance. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 29–40. ISBN 9789027277473.
• Beekes, Robert Stephen Paul (2009). Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden and Boston: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-17418-4.
• Browning, Robert (1983) [1969]. Medieval and Modern Greek. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-23488-7.
• Dawkins, Richard McGillivray; Halliday, William Reginald (1916). Modern Greek in Asia Minor: A Study of Dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa with Grammar, Texts, Translations and Glossary. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
• Dosuna, Julián Víctor Méndez (2012). "Ancient Macedonian as a Greek Dialect: A Critical Survey on Recent Work". In Giannakis, Georgios K. (ed.). Ancient Macedonia: Language, History and Culture (in Greek). Thessaloniki: Centre for the Greek Language. pp. 65–78.
• Gamkrelidze, Tamaz V.; Ivanov, Vyacheslav (March 1990). "The Early History of Indo-European Languages". Scientific American. 262 (3): 110–116. Bibcode:1990SciAm.262c.110G. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0390-110. ISSN 0036-8733. Archived from the original on 6 January 2014.
• Georgiev, Vladimir Ivanov (1981). Introduction to the History of the Indo-European Languages. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. ISBN 9789535172611.
• Gray, Russel D.; Atkinson, Quentin D. (2003). "Language-tree Divergence Times Support the Anatolian Theory of Indo-European Origin". Nature. 426 (6965): 435–439. Bibcode:2003Natur.426..435G. doi:10.1038/nature02029. PMID 14647380. S2CID 42340.
• 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. ISBN 978-3-540-78246-9.
• Hooker, J.T. (1976). Mycenaean Greece. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 9780710083791.
• Jeffries, Ian (2002). Eastern Europe at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century: A Guide to the Economies in Transition. London and New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis). ISBN 978-0-415-23671-3.
• Ligorio, Orsat; Lubotsky, Alexander (2018). "Phrygian". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias; Wenthe, Mark (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Vol. 3. De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 1816–1831. doi:10.1515/9783110542431-022. hdl:1887/63481. ISBN 978-3-11-054243-1. S2CID 242082908.
• Obrador-Cursach, Bartomeu (9 April 2020). "On the place of Phrygian among the Indo-European languages". Journal of Language Relationship. 17 (3–4): 233–245. doi:10.31826/jlr-2019-173-407. S2CID 215769896.
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  • van Beek, Lucien. "Chapter 11: Greek". In Olander (2022).
  • Olsen, Birgit Anette; Thorsø, Rasmus. "Chapter 12: Armenian". In Olander (2022).
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• Ralli, Angeliki (2001). Μορφολογία [Morphology] (in Greek). Athens: Ekdoseis Pataki.
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• Renfrew, Colin (1990) [1987]. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-38675-3.
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Further reading

• Allen, W. Sidney (1968). Vox Graeca – A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-20626-6.
• Crosby, Henry Lamar; Schaeffer, John Nevin (1928). An Introduction to Greek. Boston, MA; New York, NY: Allyn and Bacon, Inc.
• Dionysius of Thrace. Bibliotheca Augustana Τέχνη Γραμματική [Art of Grammar] (in Greek).
• Holton, David; Mackridge, Peter; Philippaki-Warburton, Irene (1997). Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-10002-1.
• Horrocks, Geoffrey (1997). Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers. London and New York: Longman Linguistics Library (Addison Wesley Longman Limited). ISBN 978-0-582-30709-4.
• Krill, Richard M. (1990). Greek and Latin in English Today. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. ISBN 978-0-86516-241-9.
• 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. ISBN 9781884964985.
• Newton, Brian (1972). The Generative Interpretation of Dialect: A Study of Modern Greek Phonology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-08497-0.
• Sihler, Andrew L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-508345-3.
• Smyth, Herbert Weir; Messing, Gordon (1956) [1920]. Greek Grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-36250-5.

External links

General background

• Greek Language, Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia.
• 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.
• Ancient Greek Tutorials, Berkeley Language Center of the University of California, Berkeley

Language learning

• Hellenistic Greek Lessons Greek-Language.com provides a free online grammar of Hellenistic Greek.
• komvos.edu.gr, a website for the support of people who are being taught the Greek language.
• New Testament Greek Archived 6 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine Three graduated courses designed to help students learn to read the Greek New Testament
• Books on Greek language that are taught at schools in Greece (in Greek)
• Greek Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh list appendix)
• USA Foreign Service Institute Modern Greek basic course
• Aversa, Alan. "Greek Inflector". Identifies the grammatical functions of all the words in sentences entered, using Perseus.

Dictionaries

• Greek Lexical Aids, descriptions of both online lexicons (with appropriate links) and Greek Lexicons in Print.
• The Greek Language Portal, dictionaries of all forms of Greek (Ancient, Hellenistic, Medieval, Modern)
• scanned images from S. C. Woodhouse's English–Greek dictionary, 1910

Literature

• Center for Neo-Hellenic Studies, a non-profit organization that promotes modern Greek literature and culture
• Research lab of modern Greek philosophy, a large e-library of modern Greek texts/books