Greek language

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

History

Earliest stages

The Greek language appeared as a spoken language at the end of the 3rd millenium BC, deriving from the Proto-Indo-European language. The first Greek-speaking tribes descended probably from an Indo-European branch, arriving through the inner Balkans and originating from the northern shores of the Black Sea. Those Proto-Greeks settled firstly in Epirus and then in the rest of Greece by assimilating previous populations: Greek was spread in the Ionian Islands and continental Greece during the last centuries of the 3rd millenium BC, then in the Aegean islands and western Anatolia during the second half of the 2nd millenium BC.

The first entrance of Greek into the historical record is from a number of clay tablets found at the Bronze Age site of Knossos, written with a syllabic system called Linear B, around 1250 BC. It was totally different from the current, Greek alphabet. In 1952 AD, Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, and discovered to be a very early stage of the Greek language, or Mycenean.

Ancient Greek

Greek then developed into the group of dialects known as Ancient Greek. It adopted its current alphabet, the Greek alphabet, approximately around 800 BC, being an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, thanks to trade between Greece and Phoenicia.

The most prominent Ancient Greek dialect was Attic, the language of Athens during the “Classical period”, which embraces the 5th and the 4rd centuries BC. 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.

During the last centuries of Antiquity, Ancient Greek underwent some important, phonetic evolutions that already anounced the main pronunciation features of Byzantine and Modern Greek.

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 in Western Europe through the Middle Ages. The eastern half of the Roman Empire (nowadays called “Byzantine 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 and of the Byzantine Empire (1453), under the Ottoman Empire and along with the independence of Greece in 1821. Popular Greek was more and more evolving —especially in morphology and lexicon— but 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. Since the 19th century, it has represented nearly all the literature, the song lyrics and the movie dialogs. It has been recognized as the sole, official language by the Greek government since 1976, as a symbol of the people's power, in reaction to the dictatorship of the colonels (1967-1974). But it was already codified in the 1940's by Manolis Triantafyllidis’ grammar. Before 1976, its supporters had to struggle harshly to obtain its official recognition.

It is the product of the linguistic evolution of the last centuries:

• This can be observed especially in the Dimotiki morphology, which is quite simpler than the ancient and the Byzantine ones (but more complicated, for example, than the German one). The verbal system is much more analytic than the ancient one, which was synthetic. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns have still a rich declension system.
• Dimotiki phonetics shares a lot of features with the Byzantine one and is notably different form the ancient one (though some important phonetic changes already occured during the last centuries of Antiquity, in Hellenistic and Roman times).
• There are a lot of usual loanwords coming from Turkish, Northern Italian (Venetian), Italian, English and French.
• But, on the other hand, Dimotiki also uses and revives a considerable amount of features from Ancient and Byzantine Greek: these are mostly words, and sometimes the archaic declensions of revived words.
• Some structural characteristics are shared with languages of the Balkans that are not directly related to Greek. This convergence is due to a long contact and is called the Balkan sprachbund. It involves Dimotiki Greek, Romanian, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Turkish and Romany.
• The orthography is quite conservative and some written distinctions are hardly understandable, unless the user knows the etymology of Ancient Greek. For example, the sound [i] is written at least by five different manners, ι, η, υ, ει, οι, which represent five ancient, different pronunciations. Fortunately, the written language has regular and predictable rules of pronunciation: each grapheme has to be pronounced in a precise way, without any doubt for the user. An important spelling simplification was carried out in 1982: a single written accent (´), matching with the stress of the modern pronunciation (monotonic system) replaced a difficult collection of various, written diacritics (´, `, ̃ , ‘, ’) that had lost their phonetic value since Antiquity (polytonic system). Only the monotonic system is required in everyday's use but some individuals, newspapers and publishing houses still use the polytonic system for esthetic reasons.

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. It combined the morphology of Ancient or Byzantine Greek with a modern pronunciation. It never gained wide acceptance in everyday's use, nor in literature, nor in song lyrics, nor in movie dialogs.

Its use is now limited, still, to the traditional rites of the Greek Orthodox Church and to the emblematic names of some institutions, buildings and streets. For example, the National Bank of Greece bears a Katharevousa name, Εθνική Τράπεζα της Ελλάδος, Ethniki Trapeza tis Ellados, instead of a Dimotiki name which would be Εθνική Τράπεζα της Ελλάδας, Ethniki Trapeza tis Elladas.