History of Greek Language

The Greek language is one of the oldest continuously spoken tongues in the world, and its 22 million speakers in Greece, Cyprus, and elsewhere can trace their language back millennia to the dawning of the written word. Today, Greek in its modern form is the official language of Greece and Cyprus, and it is spoken or understood by significant populations across the Balkans, Turkey, the United States, Russia, and elsewhere.

Greek can be traced back more than four thousand years, when a proto-Greek language entered the Greek peninsula sometime between 2500 and 1700 BC. The earliest form of true Greek was Mycenaean, the version of the language spoken in the city-state of Mycenae between 1600 and 1100 BC. This language was the first form of Greek to have a written version, known today as Linear B. These are the oldest Greek texts, but Linear B died out with the fall of the Mycenaean empire, and for five centuries there was no more written Greek.

The Classical (Ancient) Greek of 800-300 BC is well-known for the intellectual giants who spoke and wrote in it, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles. This language, which had three distinct dialect forms, was written in a Phoenician-derived alphabet still used to write Greek today. Ancient Greek survived as a literary language for centuries after the spoken form had diverged significantly from it, and even today new generations of scholars learn Ancient Greek to study ancient authors in their native tongues.

Following the classical period, Alexander the Great imposed a standardized form of Greek, kione, to replace the three dialects of Greece. This form of Greek became the form used for 800 years, as Greek became first the de facto and then the de jure language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which became in turn the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. It is also the form of Greek in which the New Testament was written.

Medieval Byzantine Greek evolved into the Demotic Greek of the common person after the empire’s fall in 1453, and upon independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s, the new Greek government imposed a “purified” (Katharévusa) form of Greek that was supposed to be free from foreign influence. This form was never widely used outside formal channels, and in the 1970s, the Demotic Greek of the average citizen became the official Greek of Greece.