Language Monday: Greek
April 2, 2018
Greek is the official language of Greece. Greek belongs to the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family. About 13 million people speak Greek today, mainly in Greece and Cyprus, where it is an official language. Greek is also recognized as a minority language in parts of Italy, and in Albania, Romania, and Ukraine. Today, the Greek alphabet is used to write only Greek. However, at various times in the past, the alphabet has been used to write many languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish.
Many of the world’s greatest poets, playwrights, and philosophers wrote in Greek during the 400’s B.C. They include the poet Homer; the dramatists Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; and the philosophers Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. Many English words are based on Greek, including architect, criticism, music, and poetry. Scientific words originating in Greek include astronaut, ecology, geography, and psychiatry.
Greek was first written in Mycenae, a city southwest of Athens. The language was written in an alphabet known as Linear B. It was used from about 1500 B.C. until the late 1100’s B.C., when the Mycenaean civilization collapsed. Writing then disappeared from Greece until the late 800’s to early 700’s B.C., when an alphabet was introduced based on the Phoenician language.
The history of early Greek has been divided into three periods. They are the Hellenic (about 500 to 300 B.C.), the Hellenistic (later 300’s to mid-100’s B.C.), and the Byzantine (about A.D. 330 to 1453). The classic Greek writers flourished during the Hellenic period. During the Hellenistic period, the language underwent major changes following the conquests of the great military leader Alexander the Great. Alexander carried a form of the language, along with Greek culture, far into western Asia. There it became the standard language of commerce and government, existing alongside many local languages. Greek was adopted as a second language by the native people of these regions and was ultimately transformed into what came to be called koiné (common) Greek.
Greek existed in several major dialects during the Hellenistic period. A combined dialect, now called Attic, eventually was produced. The Attic dialect dominated literature during the entire Byzantine era. The era began with the establishment of the city of Constantinople in 330 and ended in 1453, when Constantinople (now Istanbul) was captured by the Ottoman Empire. After Greece finally won its freedom from the Ottomans in 1830, a Greek kingdom was formed. At its core were Athens and a large peninsula west of Athens known as Peloponnesus. The dialects spoken in these areas became the basis for the spoken language, called demotic, used by Greeks today.
A Greek language called Katharevousa was a formal form of written Greek that emerged in the 1800’s. Until 1976, it was the official written language used in government and judiciary documents as well as in most newspapers and technical publications. It has now largely been replaced by written demotic.