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Greek (Modern Greek: ελληνικά elliniká) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It has the longest documented history of any living Indo-European language, spanning more than 3000 years of written records.[3] Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history; other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously.[4] The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.

RegionGreece, Eastern Mediterranean
Native speakers
13.4 million (2012)[1]
Early form
Language codes
ISO 639-1el
ISO 639-2gre (B)
ell (T)
ISO 639-3Variously:
ell – Modern Greek
grc – Ancient Greek
cpg – Cappadocian Greek
gmy – Mycenaean Greek
pnt – Pontic
tsd – Tsakonian
yej – Yevanic
  • 56-AAA-a
  • 56-AAA-aa to -am (varieties)


During antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world, West Asia and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire and develop into Medieval Greek.[5] In its modern form, Greek is the official language in two countries, Greece and Cyprus, a recognised minority language in seven other countries, and is one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. The language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, and Turkey and by the Greek diaspora.


Idealised portrayal of Homer


Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC,[6] or possibly earlier.[7] The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC,[8] making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages.



The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods:

  • Modern Greek (Neo-Hellenic):[11] 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.



Historical unityEdit

The distribution of major modern Greek dialect areas


Geographic distributionEdit

Greek language road sign, A27 Motorway, Greece
Spread of Greek in the United States

Greek is spoken by at least 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Historically, there were traditional Greek-speaking settlements and regions in the neighbouring countries of Albania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, as well as in several countries in the Black Sea area, such as Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and around the Mediterranean Sea, Southern Italy, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya and ancient coastal towns along the Levant. Particularly in Albania due to the immigration wave towards Greece today a significant percentage of the population can speak the Greek language, or at least has some basic knowledge of it. The language is also spoken by Greek emigrant communities in many countries in Western Europe, especially the United Kingdom and Germany, Canada, the United States, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa and others.

Official statusEdit

Greek is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population.[15] It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish).[16] Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages.[17] Furthermore, Greek is officially recognised as a minority language in parts of Italy and official in Dropull and Himara (Albania) and as a minority language all over Albania,[18] as well as in Armenia, Romania, and Ukraine as a regional or minority language in the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.[19] Greeks are also a recognised ethnic minority in Hungary.





  • replacement of the pitch accent with a stress accent.



Nouns and adjectivesEdit




Ancient Greek Modern Greek
Person first, second and third also second person formal
Number singular, dual and plural singular and plural
mood indicative, subjunctive, imperative and optative indicative, subjunctive,[22] and imperative (other modal functions are expressed by periphrastic constructions)
Voice active, middle, and passive active and medio-passive




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,[23] some documented in Mycenaean texts; they include a large number of Greek toponyms. The form and meaning of many words have evolved. 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 South Slavic (Macedonian/Bulgarian) and Eastern Romance languages (Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian).

Greek loanwords in other languagesEdit



Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian,[25] which many scholars suggest may have been a dialect of Greek itself, but it is so poorly attested that it is difficult to conclude anything about it.[26] Independently of the Macedonian question, some scholars have grouped Greek into Graeco-Phrygian, as Greek and the extinct Phrygian share features that are not found in other Indo-European languages.[27] 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 for grouping the living branches of the family.[28] In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian by some linguists. If proven and recognised, the three languages would form a new Balkan sub-branch with other dead European languages.[29]

Writing systemEdit

Linear BEdit

Linear B, attested as early as the late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek.[30] 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).[30] The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek.[30]

Cypriot syllabaryEdit

Greek inscription in Cypriot syllabic script


Greek alphabetEdit




upper case
lower case
τ υ φ χ ψ ω






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.[33] Boustrophedon, or bi-directional text, was also used in Ancient Greek.

Latin alphabetEdit

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.[34]

See alsoEdit



  1. ^ Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Ancient Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Cappadocian Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Mycenaean Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Pontic at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Tsakonian at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Greek". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. ^ "Greek language". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 29 April 2014.
  4. ^ 1922-, 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.
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ^ Renfrew 2003, p. 35; Georgiev 1981, p. 192.
  7. ^ Gray & Atkinson 2003, pp. 437–438; Atkinson & Gray 2006, p. 102.
  8. ^ "Ancient Tablet Found: Oldest Readable Writing in Europe". National Geographic Society. 30 March 2011. Retrieved 22 November 2013.
  10. ^ Dawkins & Halliday 1916.
  11. ^ Ethnologue
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ Browning 1983.
  14. ^ Alexiou 1982, pp. 156–192.
  15. ^ "Greece". The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
  16. ^ "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].
  17. ^ "The EU at a Glance – Languages in the EU". Europa. European Union. Retrieved 30 July 2010.
  18. ^ "Greek". Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Archived from the original on 18 November 2008. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
  19. ^ "List of Declarations Made with Respect to Treaty No. 148". Council of Europe. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
  20. ^ Ralli 2001, pp. 164–203.
  23. ^ Beekes 2009.
  24. ^ Scheler 1977.
  25. ^ Hamp 2013, pp. 8–10, 13.
  26. ^ Babiniotis 1992, pp. 29–40; Dosuna 2012, pp. 65–78.
  27. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Graeco-Phrygian". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  28. ^ Renfrew 1990; Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1990, pp. 110–116; Renfrew 2003, pp. 17–48; Gray & Atkinson 2003, pp. 435–439.
  29. ^ Holm 2008, pp. 628–636.
  30. ^ a b c T., Hooker, J. (1980). Linear B : an introduction. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. ISBN 978-0-906515-69-3. OCLC 7326206.
  31. ^ "Cypriot syllabary". Britannica Academic. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  32. ^ Nicolas, Nick (2005). "Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation". Archived from the original on 6 August 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  33. ^ Hugoe), Matthews, P. H. (Peter (March 2014). The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics. Oxford University Press. (Third ed.). [Oxford]. ISBN 978-0-19-967512-8. OCLC 881847972.
  34. ^ Androutsopoulos 2009, pp. 221–249.


Further readingEdit

External linksEdit

General background
Language learning