Greek language
Greek has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. A clay tablet found in Messenia, inscribed in the Linear B script and dated to between 1450 and 1350 BC, makes it the world's oldest recorded living language. From that single artifact stretches a chain that runs through Homer, the New Testament, and the streets of modern Athens, unbroken. How does one language survive that long without splintering into something its own speakers no longer recognize? Why do words coined in this tongue still name the newest sciences? And how did a language native to a corner of the Balkans end up spoken from Egypt to the fringes of India? The answers reach across roughly 2,800 years of writing and a writing system or two that came before it.
Proto-Greek is the unrecorded ancestor that linguists assume sits behind every known variety of the language. Its unity would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula during the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age. From there the language is conventionally divided into a sequence of stages, each with its own character.
Mycenaean Greek is the language of the Mycenaean civilisation, recorded on tablets from the 15th century BC onward. Ancient Greek followed in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods, widely known throughout the Roman Empire. It fell into disuse in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, yet remained officially in use in the Byzantine world.
Koine Greek emerged from a fusion of Ionian with Attic, the dialect of Athens, producing the first common Greek dialect. Medieval Greek, also called Byzantine Greek, continued Koine up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. It was never one thing but a continuum, ranging from vernacular speech already drifting toward the modern language to highly learned forms imitating classical Attic. Modern Greek stems from this medieval stage and can be traced as early as the 11th century, the language of the modern Greeks and their several dialects.
During antiquity, Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world. Koine Greek can first be 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.
The sheer reach of the language forced a reckoning over what counted as correct usage. A set of rules had to be established for proper dissemination, and it is at this point that the term Hellenism first appears. Hellenism was used by the grammarians and by Strabo to denote correct Greek.
After the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin took hold in the city of Rome itself. In the eastern parts of the empire, Rome refrained from imposing Latin and communicated with its subjects in Greek, even where Greek was not the predominant spoken tongue. Christianity itself can be traced through this same form of the language. The Apostles used Koine to spread the faith, the New Testament was originally written in it, and the Old Testament was translated into it as the Septuagint, giving rise to the variety known as New Testament Greek or Biblical Greek.
In the modern era, Greek entered a state of diglossia, the coexistence of a vernacular and an archaising written form. The polarisation between them became known as the Greek language question, a contest between two competing varieties of Modern Greek. On one side stood Dimotiki, the vernacular form. On the other stood Katharevousa, meaning purified, a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in the early 19th century for literary and official use in the newly formed Greek state.
The clash between the two was sometimes violent. Renderings of ancient Greek or biblical works into vernacular Greek provoked riots, among them the Evangelika, or Gospel riots, and the Orestiaka, or Oresteia riots, and even deaths. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece. By then it had absorbed features of Katharevousa, giving birth to Standard Modern Greek, used today for all official purposes and in education.
Never since classical antiquity has the language's cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one could speak of a new language emerging. Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those in other languages, yet the thread holds. Greek speakers today still tend to regard the literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own tongue rather than a foreign one.
The scale of change is often described as relatively slight. One estimation puts it this way: "Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English". The conventional division into periods is, like all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, in part because Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige in every era, and the literate borrowed heavily from it.
The syllabic structure of Greek has varied little across its history. It permits complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas, with only oral vowels and a fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts. The main phonological changes came during the Hellenistic and Roman period. The pitch accent gave way to a stress accent. The vowel system simplified, losing the distinction in vowel length, flattening most diphthongs, and shifting several vowels toward the sound /i/, a change known as iotacism.
The consonants shifted too. Voiceless aspirated plosives developed into the fricatives /f/ and /θ/, while voiced plosives became their voiced fricative counterparts, including the /b/ that became /v/. These shifts were never reflected in the orthography, so the same letters carried both the earlier and later sounds.
The grammar tells a parallel story of loss and replacement. The dative case fell into disuse, its functions largely taken over by the genitive. The verbal system shed the infinitive, the synthetically-formed future and perfect tenses, and the optative mood, many of them replaced by periphrastic constructions. Pronouns once distinguished a dual number alongside singular and plural, and declined for six cases in the earliest attested forms; the modern language keeps four. Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, while neutral word order in the modern language is verb-subject-object or subject-verb-object.
Greek roots have been used for centuries to coin new words in other languages, and they remain in heavy use today. Together with Latin, Greek is highly influential on English and remains a predominant source of international scientific vocabulary. Borrowed words include mathematics, physics, astronomy, democracy, philosophy, athletics, theatre, rhetoric, baptism, and evangelist.
The coinage never stopped. Greek word elements continue to be productive as a basis for neologisms such as anthropology, photography, telephony, isomer, biomechanics, and cinematography. Every word ending in -logy, meaning discourse, draws on this same well.
Greek itself was also a borrower. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, but it absorbed words from the populations that inhabited Greece before the Proto-Greeks arrived, some documented in Mycenaean texts and surviving as a large number of toponyms. Later loanwords came mainly from Latin, Venetian, Ottoman Turkish, and Semitic languages. In older periods, loanwords acquired Greek inflections, leaving only a foreign root; modern borrowings from French and English, by contrast, are typically not inflected.
Linear B, attested as early as the late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary, deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s, building on the research of Alice Kober. Its precursor, Linear A, has never been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language. A related system, the Cypriot syllabary, was used in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period.
The Greek alphabet has been in use since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet, with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent vowels. The variant used today is essentially the late Ionic form, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed; the lower-case forms were developed much later by medieval scribes for faster cursive writing with ink and quill. The alphabet consists of 24 letters, with the letter sigma carrying an extra lowercase form used at the end of a word.
The diacritics tell their own history. Three accent marks, the acute, grave, and circumflex, once denoted shapes of pitch accent, while breathing marks signaled the presence or absence of a word-initial /h/. These were introduced during the Hellenistic period. After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics fell away, leaving the simplified monotonic orthography that uses only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The older polytonic system is still used internationally for writing Ancient Greek. One quirk endures on the page: in Greek the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while a raised point called the ano teleia does the work of the colon and semicolon.
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Common questions
What is the Greek language and what family does it belong to?
Greek is an Indo-European language that constitutes an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to territories with Greek populations since antiquity, including Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Turkey, parts of Italy, southern Albania, and other regions around the Balkans, Caucasus, Black Sea, and Eastern Mediterranean.
How old is the Greek language and what is its earliest written record?
Greek has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia dated to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language.
How many people speak Greek and where is it spoken today?
Greek is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today, principally in Greece and Cyprus, along with communities in Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. The diaspora has notable communities in the United States, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and throughout the European Union, especially Germany.
What was the Greek language question and when was Dimotiki made official?
The Greek language question was a polarisation between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki, the vernacular form, and Katharevousa, a purified compromise with Ancient Greek developed in the early 19th century. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, giving birth to Standard Modern Greek after absorbing features of Katharevousa.
What writing systems have been used for Greek and who deciphered Linear B?
Greek has been written in Linear B, the Cypriot syllabary, and since approximately the 9th century BC the Greek alphabet, which was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet. Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s, based on the research of Alice Kober.
Why is Greek important to science and the English language?
Greek roots have been used for centuries to coin new words in other languages and, together with Latin, remain a predominant source of international scientific vocabulary. Borrowed words include mathematics, physics, astronomy, democracy, and philosophy, while Greek elements still form neologisms such as anthropology, photography, and cinematography.
What were the official languages of the Byzantine Empire and early Christianity in Greek?
Greek became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek. Koine Greek was the original language of the New Testament, and the Old Testament was translated into it as the Septuagint, so that variety is referred to as New Testament Greek or Biblical Greek.