Modern Greek Νεοελληνικά/Ρωμαίικα Neoelliniká/Romaíika |
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Spoken in: | Greece, Cyprus, Albania, FYROM, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Spain, Armenia, Georgia, Egypt, Jordan, United Kingdom, Germany, Ukraine, Russia, South Africa, Kazakhstan, France, Canada, Australia, United States of America, and the rest of the Greek diaspora. | |
Total speakers: | 15 million[1][2] | |
Ranking: | 52 | |
Language family: | Indo-European Proto-Greek Attic Greek Modern Greek |
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Writing system: | Greek alphabet | |
Official status | ||
Official language in: | ![]() ![]() ![]() recognised as minority language in parts of: ![]() ![]() ![]() |
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Regulated by: | No official regulation | |
Language codes | ||
ISO 639-1: | el | |
ISO 639-2: | gre (B) | ell (T) |
ISO 639-3: | either: grc – Ancient Greek ell – Modern Greek |
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Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. |
History of the Greek language (see also: Greek alphabet) |
Proto-Greek (c. 2000 BC)
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Mycenaean (c. 1600–1000 BC)
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Ancient Greek (c. 1000–330 BC) Dialects: Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, Attic-Ionic, Doric, Locrian, Pamphylian; Homeric Greek. Possibly Macedonian. |
Koine Greek (c. 330 BC–330)*
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Medieval Greek (330–1453)
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Modern Greek (from 1453) Dialects: Cappadocian, Cretan, Cypriot, Demotic, Griko, Katharevousa, Pontic, Tsakonian, Yevanic *Dates (beginning with Ancient Greek) from D.B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids 1997), 12. |
Modern Greek (Νέα Ελληνικά or Νεοελληνική, lit. 'Neo-Hellenic', historically also known as Ρωμαίικα, lit. 'Romaic') refers to the fifth stage of the evolution of the Greek language, i.e. the varieties of Greek spoken in the modern era. Greek is spoken today by approximately 14-17 million people[2], mainly in Greece and Cyprus but also by minority and immigrant communities in many other countries. The start of the period of the Greek language known as "Modern Greek" is symbolically assigned in the fall of the Byzantine Empire (1453), although strictly speaking it has been shaped since at least the 11th century. During much of this time, the language existed in a situation of diglossia, with regional spoken dialects existing side by side with learned, archaic written forms. Most notably, during much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was known in the competing varieties of popular Demotic and learned Katharevousa. Today, Standard Modern Greek, based on Demotic, is the official language of both Greece and Cyprus.
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Greek forms an independent branch of the Indo-European languages. Within Greek, all surviving forms of Modern Greek, except the Tsakonian dialect, are descendants of the common supra-regional (Koine) as it was spoken in late antiquity. As such, they can ultimately be classified as descendants of Attic, the dialect spoken in and around Athens in the classical era. Tsakonian, an isolated dialect spoken today by a dwindling community in the Peloponese, is a descendant of the ancient Doric dialect. Some other dialects have preserved elements of various ancient non-Attic dialects, but Attic Koine is nevertheless regarded by most scholars as the principal source of all of them.
Modern Greek is spoken by about 14-17 million people mainly in Greece and Cyprus. There are also traditional Greek-speaking settlements in the neighboring countries Albania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey, as well as in several countries in the Black Sea area (Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Armenia) and around the Mediterranean Sea (Southern Italy, Israel, Egypt). The language is also spoken by emigrant communities in many countries in Western Europe, North America, Australia, as well as in Argentina, Brazil and others. Countries with notable number of speakers of Greek as a foreign language are Serbia, Albania, FYROM, Bulgaria and Romania.
Greek is the official language of Greece where it is spoken by about 99.5% of the population. It is also, alongside Turkish, the official language of Cyprus. Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the 23 official languages of the European Union. Greek is officially recognised as a minority language in parts of Turkey, Italy and Albania.
The main dialects of Modern Greek are:
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Map showing the distribution of major Modern Greek dialect areas[3] |
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Map showing important isoglosses between the traditional Modern Greek dialects (c.1900).[4]
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Koiné Modern Greek (Κοινή Νεοελληνική) refers to the idiom of Demotic that was chosen as the official language of the Hellenic Republic and Cyprus. In English it is usually referred to as Standard Modern Greek. In its pure form it is spoken mainly in the urban parts of Greece, while its various idioms are the vernacular language of most rural Greece and the Greek Diaspora throughout the world. Koiné Modern Greek evolves from the Southern Demotic idioms, mainly the ones of Peloponnese.
In short, Koiné Modern Greek is the natural continuation of Koine Greek, an ancient Greek dialect (known also as the "Alexandrian language") which came into existence after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Hellenization of the known world. Hellenistic Koiné had assimilated many elements from various different Greek dialects (such as Ionic, Doric and Aeolic) but its nucleus had always been Attic (the dialect of Athens). Hellenistic Koine had been spoken in several different forms in the region of Greece and the Greek speaking world during the entire Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, until it took the shape of Demotic in the Middle Ages.
After Greece gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1829, the same dual-language status of the late Byzantine Empire was re-adapted. The vernacular speech was Demotic (a term similar to "popular") and the official state dialect was Katharevousa ("purified"). Demotic was the language of daily use, and the latter was an archaic form (closer to Attic), used for official documents, literature, newscasting and other formal purposes. In 1976 Katharevousa was replaced by Demotic as the official language of the Greek state. During its long history the Greek language assimilated vocabulary from various languages such as Latin, Italian, and Ottoman Turkish, a substantial part of which lapsed during its long-lasting co-existence with Katharevousa.
A series of radical sound shifts, which the Greek language underwent mainly during the period of Koine, has led to a phonological system in Modern Greek that is significantly different from that of Ancient Greek. Instead of the rich vowel system of Ancient Greek, with its four vowel-height levels, length distinction, and multiple diphthongs, Modern Greek has a very simple system of five vowels. This came about through a series of mergers, especially towards /i/ (iotacism). In the consonants, Modern Greek has two series of fricatives in lieu of the Ancient Greek voiced and aspirated voiceless plosives. Modern Greek has not preserved length distinctions, either in the vowels or in the consonants.
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Greek alphabet | |||||
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Αα Alpha | Νν Nu | ||||
Ββ Beta | Ξξ Xi | ||||
Γγ Gamma | Οο Omicron | ||||
Δδ Delta | Ππ Pi | ||||
Εε Epsilon | Ρρ Rho | ||||
Ζζ Zeta | Σσς Sigma | ||||
Ηη Eta | Ττ Tau | ||||
Θθ Theta | Υυ Upsilon | ||||
Ιι Iota | Φφ Phi | ||||
Κκ Kappa | Χχ Chi | ||||
Λλ Lambda | Ψψ Psi | ||||
Μμ Mu | Ωω Omega | ||||
Obsolete letters | |||||
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Other characters | |||||
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Greek diacritics |
Modern Greek is written in the Greek alphabet, which has 24 letters, each with a capital and lowercase (small) form. The letter sigma additionally has a special final form. There are two diacritical symbols, the acute accent which indicates stress and the diaeresis marking a vowel letter as not being part of a digraph. Greek has a mixed historical and phonemic orthography, where historical spellings are used if their pronunciation matches modern usage. The correspondence between consonant phonemes and graphemes is largely unique,[5] but several of the vowel phonemes can be spelled in multiple ways.[6] Thus reading is easy but spelling is difficult.[7]
A number of diacritical signs were used until 1982, when they were officially dropped from Greek spelling as no longer corresponding to the modern pronunciation of the language. See monotonic orthography for the simplified modern set, and polytonic orthography for the traditional set. Monotonic orthography is today used in official usage, in schools and for most purposes of everyday writing in Greece. Polytonic orthography, besides being used for older varieties of Greek, is still used in book printing, especially for academic and belletristic purposes, and in everyday use by some conservative writers and elderly people. The Greek Orthodox Church continues to use polytonic and Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens[8] and the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece[9] have requested the reintroduction of polytonic as the official script.
The Greek vowel letters with their pronunciation are: <α> [a], <ε> [e̞], <η> [i], <ι> [i], <ο> [o̞], <υ> [i], <ω> [o̞]. There are also vowel digraphs which are phonetically monophthongal: <αι> [e̞], <ει> [i], <οι> [i], <ου> [u], <υι> [i]. The three digraphs <αυ>, <ευ> and <ηυ> are pronounced [af], [e̞f] and [if] except when followed by voiced consonants or vowels, in which case they are pronounced [av], [e̞v] and [iv] respectively.
Modern Greek has also four diphthongs: <αη> (or <άη>) [aj], <αϊ> (or <άι>) [aj], <οη> (or <όη>) [o̞j] and <οϊ> (or <όι>) [o̞j] (diphthongs can better be transcribed using the IPA non-syllabic diacritic under [i] instead of the approximant [j]).
The Greek letters <β> and <δ> are pronounced [v] and [ð] respectively. The letter <γ> is generally pronounced [ɣ], but before the mid or close front vowels, it is pronounced [ʝ] (or [ʑ] and [ʒ] in some dialects, notably those of Crete and the Mani). Μoreover, before the mid or close back vowels, tends to be pronounced further back than a prototypical velar, between a velar [ɣ] and an uvular [ɢ] (transcribed [ɣ̄]).
The letters <θ>, <φ> and <χ> are pronounced [θ], [f] and [x] respectively. The letter <χ>, before mid or close front vowels, is pronounced [ç] (or [ɕ] and [ʃ] in some dialects, notably those of Crete and the Mani) and before the mid or close back vowels, tends to be pronounced as a postvelar [x̱]. The letter <ξ> stands for [k͡s] and <ψ> stands for [p͡s]. The digraphs <γγ> and <γκ> are generally pronounced [ɡ] in everyday speech, but are pronounced [ɟ] before the front vowels [e̞] and [i] and tend to be pronounced [ɡ̄] before the back [o̞] and [u]. When these digraphs are preceded by a vowel, they are pronounced [ŋɡ] in formal speech ([ɲɟ] before the front vowels [e̞] and [i] and [ŋ̄ɡ̄] before the back [o̞] and [u]). The digraph <γγ> may be pronounced [ŋɣ] in some words ([ɲʝ] before front vowels and [ŋ̄ɣ̄] before back ones). The pronunciation [ŋk] for the digraph <γκ> is extremely rare, but could be heard in literary and scholarly words or when reading ancient texts (by a few readers); whereas retains its "original" pronunciation [ŋk] only in the trigraph <γκτ> where <τ> prevents the sonorization of <κ> by <γ> (hence [ŋkt]).
Modern Greek is still largely a synthetic language. It is one of the few Indo-European languages that has retained a synthetic passive. Noticeable changes in grammar (compared to classical Greek) include the loss of the dative case, the optative mood, the infinitive, the dual number, and the participles (except the past participle); the adoption of the gerund; the reduction in the number of noun declensions, and the number of distinct forms in each declension; the adoption of the modal particle θα (a contraction of ἐθέλω ἵνα > θέλω να > θε' να > θα) to denote future and conditional tenses; the introduction of auxiliary verb forms for certain tenses; the extension to the future tense of the aspectual distinction between present/imperfect and aorist; the loss of the third person imperative, and the simplification of the system of grammatical prefixes, such as augmentation and reduplication. Some of these features are shared with other languages spoken in the Balkan peninsula (see Balkan linguistic union), although not others, such as the postposed article.
Because of the influence of Katharevousa, however, Demotic is not commonly used in its purest form, and archaisms are still widely used, especially in writing and in more formal speech, as well as in some everyday expressions, such as the dative εντάξει ('OK', literally 'in order') or the third person imperative ζήτω! ('long live!').
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