Ancient Greek dialects

• 1. Introduction

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  Ancient Greek dialects are the regional varieties of a language that shaped some of the oldest surviving literature in the Western world. Before a single shared form called Koine swept across the Greek-speaking world during the Hellenistic period, Greek existed as a patchwork of distinct speech communities spread across the Aegean, the Greek mainland, and the coasts of Asia Minor. What kept them apart? What allowed each one to develop its own sounds, its own literary traditions, its own sense of identity? And what finally pulled them together into something common? The answers reach back to the Bronze Age, wind through the terrain of a fragmented peninsula, and touch the careers of poets, philosophers, historians, and playwrights whose names are still familiar today.

• 2. Roots in the Bronze Age

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  Mycenaean Greek is the oldest known form of the Greek language, recorded not in an alphabet but on clay tablets written in the script called Linear B. These tablets survive from the Mycenaean civilization of the Late Bronze Age, in the late 2nd millennium BC. When that civilization collapsed, Greek-speaking communities fractured and scattered. Some speakers of Mycenaean were displaced to Cyprus; others stayed inland on the Greek mainland in the region of Arcadia. From both of those isolated populations grew the Arcadocypriot dialect, making it the only ancient Greek dialect with a documented Bronze Age ancestor. The other dialects that emerged in the Iron Age must have had their own prehistory before their earliest written records, but how exactly they connect to Mycenaean Greek remains an open question for scholars.

• 3. A Landscape of Voices

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  Doric Greek spread from a probable origin in northwestern Greece southward to the Peloponnesus, reaching as far as Sparta, Crete, and the southernmost stretches of the Asian coast. Northwest Greek, sometimes called Northwest Doric, occupied nearby territory and is treated by some scholars as a separate dialect and by others as a branch of Doric. Most scholars regard Ancient Macedonian as another Greek dialect related to Northwest Greek. Aeolic was spoken in three subdialects: Lesbian on the island of Lesbos and the western coast of Asia Minor north of Smyrna; Boeotian and Thessalian on the northeastern Greek mainland. Ionic spread along the western coast of Asia Minor, including Smyrna and the territory to its south, and also on the island of Euboea. Attic, a sub- or sister-dialect of Ionic, was for centuries the language of Athens. Because Macedon had already adopted Attic before Alexander the Great began his conquests, Attic became the foundation for the Koine that would later spread across the Hellenistic world.

• 4. Dialects on the Page

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  Ancient Greek authors did not always write in their native speech. Writers chose a dialect based on what was traditional or appropriate for the type of literature they were producing. Epic poetry meant Homeric Greek, a literary blend of Ionic and Aeolic features used in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns, all written in dactylic hexameter. Hesiod used a similar dialect, and later epic writers such as Apollonius Rhodius in the Argonautica and Nonnus in the Dionysiaca followed the same convention. Ionic proper appears first in Archilochus of Paros. The earliest surviving Greek prose also belongs to Ionic, the language of Heraclitus, Herodotus, Democritus, and Hippocrates. Doric served as the conventional dialect of choral lyric poetry, associated with Alcman of Laconia, Pindar of Thebes, and the choral songs inside Attic tragedy. Aeolic belonged almost exclusively to lyric poetry. Sappho and Alcaeus wrote in Lesbian Aeolic; Corinna of Tanagra wrote in Boeotian. Attic prose was the language of the orators Lysias, Isocrates, Aeschines, and Demosthenes; of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle; and of the historian Xenophon. Some dialects, including Thessalic, Northwest Doric, Arcadocypriot, and Pamphylian, never developed into literary languages at all and survive only in inscriptions and in the comic parodies of Aristophanes.

• 5. Sound and Change

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  The most visible differences among the ancient dialects show up in vowels. A key driver of this divergence was a process Greeks called hiatus, the collision of two vowels that arose when the sounds that once separated them dropped away. Proto-Greek lost certain sounds between vowels, including a consonantal w, and where those sounds vanished, neighboring vowels came into contact. Speakers in different regions resolved those collisions in different ways. The word for the sea god, in its prehistoric form poseidawon, illustrates the point. Once the intervocalic w fell away, speakers in Corinth, Boeotia, Crete, Rhodes, Delphi, Lesbos, and Arcadia each arrived at a different result. A particularly significant vowel shift separated Ionic and Attic from the rest of the dialects: the long vowel spelled alpha in most dialects shifted to eta in Ionic and Attic. Ionic made the change in all positions; Attic made it almost everywhere except after the letters for e, i, and r. So where a Doric or Aeolic speaker said mater for "mother," with the long alpha still intact, an Attic or Ionic speaker said meter.

• 6. Convergence and Survival

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  Ancient scholars themselves tried to organize the dialects into systems, though their categories did not always match the linguistic evidence. The ancient classification counted three gene or four dialects: Ionic proper, Ionic in its Attic form, Aeolic, and Doric, with Koine added later as a fifth. Strabo, for instance, argued that Ionic and Attic were essentially the same thing, and that outside the Isthmus all Greeks other than the Athenians, the Megarians, and the Dorians near Parnassus were Aeolians. Modern scholars have grouped the dialects differently. Mycenaean was deciphered only in 1952, which meant it was missing from earlier classification schemes. Ernst Risch writing in Museum Helveticum in 1955 and C.D. Buck in The Greek Dialects, also 1955, both produced influential groupings that differed from each other and from earlier frameworks. The collapse of the regional dialects was not a sudden event. Increasing population and communication pulled speakers together under shared authorities. Buck observed that long after Attic became the standard of literary prose, individual states continued using their own dialects for private documents, public inscriptions, and even interstate agreements like treaties. Regional koines emerged in the last few centuries BC: a Northwest Greek koine, a Doric koine, and an Attic koine. The Attic koine eventually displaced the others in everyday speech during the first few centuries AD. Of all the dialects that existed in classical antiquity, only Tsakonian preserves a lineage from Doric, according to some scholars, while Pontic Greek retains certain Ionic features, and the Southern Italian dialects known as Griko and Calabrian keep traces of Doric as well.