Greek language

The Greek language (in Modern Greek: ελληνικά, ellinika or ελληνική γλώσσα, elliniki glossa; in Ancient Greek: ἑλληνικὴ γλῶττα, hellēnikē glōtta) is a language mainly spoken in Greece and Cyprus, belonging to the Indo-European language family.

History

Ancient Greek

The first entrance of Greek into the historical record is from a number of clay tablets found at the Bronze Age site of Knossos. In the mid-20th century, the script of these tablets, Linear B, was deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, and discovered to be a very early stage of the Greek language, or Mycenean.

Greek then developed into the group of dialects known as Ancient Greek. The most prominent Ancient Greek dialect was Attic, the language of Athens during the Classical period. This is the language of Demosthenes, Plato and Thucydides. Ionic is a dialect that was most famously used by the historian Herodotus. A limited amount of writing has come down to us in the other Ancient Greek dialects (such as Aeolic, Arcadian-Cypriot, and Doric). The inclusion of Ancient Macedonian in Greek is debated. Greek writers (and poets in particular) came to associate the dialects with particular styles of poetry. Aeolic, for instance, was the dialect of the poet Sappho. The Doric dialect came to be associated with Bucolic poetry, to such an extent that the poet Theocritus removed all non-Doric traces from his poems about the countryside. Similarly, though early scholars believed it to be an early stage of Ionic, the language of the Homeric poems has also been shown to be a literary language.

Attic Greek enjoyed wide use during the Classical period, and came to be even more widespread in the post-classical period as Koiné Greek. During the Roman Empire, even as well-educated Romans were expected to have command of the literature of the Classical period, the unprestigious Koiné came to have wide use through much of the Empire as the language of business, the everyday and the lower classes.

In the first centuries of the common era, the new Christian religion and the Greek language had an intense, productive relationship. Most crucially, the New Testament was written in Koiné Greek, and much of the proselytizing of the early Christians must have taken place in Greek. Furthermore, Greek played an important role in the elaboration and refinement of Christian doctrine. Greek writers were at the forefront of every major theological debate and were widely influential, even on writers in Latin.

Cicero had earlier complained that the Latin language was not well-suited to philosophy, and Christians writing in Latin had similar problems. After the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, and the definition of orthodoxy became a matter of state, many Latin-speaking theologians looked east to Greek-speakers and their long tradition of philosophical inquiry for clarification.

Byzantine Greek

As the western half of the Empire gave way to its successor states, knowledge of Greek there became a rarity and Latin rose to the prominence it enjoyed through the Middle Ages. The eastern half of the Empire continued about its business and did so, as it always had, in Greek. Interestingly, though they maintained only tenuous connections with the Latin West, they continued to consider themselves "Romans." (Today, for the sake of tradition and convenience, they are usually called "Byzantines.") With only a handful of exceptions, Byzantine writers preferred to express themselves in the language of classical Athens.

Modern Greek

The Greek language continued to change, until it issued in what is now Modern Greek. Modern Greek emerged progressively during the Modern Era, after the fall of Constantinople (1453) and under the Ottoman occupation. The popular use evolved especially in morphology, which was somewhat simplified. But popular Greek remained constantly in contact with the learned and archaic Byzantine Greek used by the Orthodox Church. As a result, since the independence of Greece in 1821, Modern Greek has been cultivated under two competing varieties: Dimotiki (the “popular language”) and Katharevousa (“the purifying language”).

• Dimotiki

Dimotiki (δημοτική, that is “popular language”) is a standard variety derived from everyday's popular use. It has been recognized as the sole, official language by the Greek government since 1976, as a symbol of democracy, following the dictatorship of the colonels (1967-1974). But it was already codifed in the 1940's by Manolis Triantafyllidis's grammar.

Since the 19th century, Dimotiki has represented nearly all the literature and song lyrics. It is the product of the linguistic evolution of the last centuries. On one hand, it has a lot of usual loanwords coming from Turkish, Northern Italian (Venetian), Italian, English and French but, on the other hand, it also uses and revives a considerable amount of words and features from Ancient and Byzantine Greek.

It shares some structural characteristics with languages of the Balkans that are not directly related to Greek, due to a long contact. This is called the Balkan sprachbund, involving Dimotiki Greek, Romanian, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Turkish and Romany.

• Katharevousa

Katharevousa (καθαρεύουσα, that is “purifying language”) was the official standard from the independence of Greece, in 1821, until 1976. It was a formal, archaizing variety, connected with the use of the Orthodox Church, which combined the morphology of Ancient Greek with a modern pronunciation. It never gained wide acceptance in everyday's use, nor in literature, nor in song lyrics.

Its use is now limited to the emblematic names of some institutions, buildings and streets and, still, to the traditional rites of the Greek Orthodox Church.