An archaic dialect of Greek spoken by the Sarakatsani of Greek Macedonia and elsewhere in Northern Greece, a traditionally transhument, clan-based community of mountain shepherds. The form and meaning of many words have evolved. There is no particular morphological form that can be identified as 'subjunctive' in the modern language, but the term is sometimes encountered in descriptions even if the most complete modern grammar (Holton et al. 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. The dialect spoken in Greece (as well as in Bulgaria, Albania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, parts of Turkey, and Ukraine) is known as Balkan Romani. This usage is sometimes called aljamiado as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Greeks write their language using the Greek alphabet. [note 2] Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. The verbal system has lost the infinitive, the synthetically-formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, having incorporated features of Katharevousa and giving birth to Standard Modern Greek, which is used today for all official purposes and in education. The Aromanians, also known as Vlachs, are a population group linguistically related to Romanians. The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina. It has very few speakers and was previously thought to be extinct. [18] Greeks are also a recognized ethnic minority in Hungary.[19]. The form of Greek used by writers from Homer (8th century B.C.) These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. The Cretan dialect is spoken by the majority of the Cretan Greeks in the island of Crete, as well as by several thousand Cretans who have settled in major Greek cities, notably in Athens, and in areas settled by Ottoman-era Cretan Greek Muslims (the so-called Cretan Turks), such as the town of Al-Hamidiyah in Syria.

The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia: the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. During antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world, West Asia and many places beyond. The most common foreign languages learned by Greeks are English, German, French and Italian. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki, the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa, meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek, which was developed in the early 19th century, and was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. Greek (Ελληνικά, romanized: Elliniká) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, Albania, other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
Greek (Greek: Ελληνικά, romanized: Elliniká) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, Albania, other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.It has the longest documented history of any living Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,500 years of written records. 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). The Thracian Greek dialect is spoken mainly in Western Thrace and by the Greek minority in other areas of Thrace outside the Greek borders. The older generation of Caucasus Greeks settled mainly in Salonika, Kilkis and elsewhere in Central Macedonia in circa 1920 also speak Russian as a second language, as do most Greeks who had settled in Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and other Eastern Bloc states following the Greek Civil War, returning to Greece mainly in the early 1990s. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet.[32]. If proven and recognized, the three languages would form a new Balkan sub-branch with other dead European languages. It has only oral vowels and a fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive). All surviving forms of modern Greek, except the Tsakonian language, are descendants of the common supra-regional (koiné) as it was spoken in late antiquity. [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.
As well as ethnic Georgians, these include those defined as Caucasus Greeks or ethnic Greeks in Georgia, from especially the south of the country and the Tsalka region in the centre. 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,[21] some documented in Mycenaean texts; they include a large number of Greek toponyms.

The Aromanian, a Balkan Romance language, is spoken by the some 40,000 Aromanians in Greece. Cypriot Greek (Κυπριακή διάλεκτος) is spoken by Greek Cypriots, in Cyprus about 659,115(in 2011) and many of them settled in many Greek cities, and in many other parts of the world including Australia, Canada and the Americas the total speakers are about 1.20 million people. There are a total of roughly 50 speakers, around 35 of whom now reside in Israel. Standard Modern Greek is the officially used standard, but there are several non-official dialects and distinct Hellenic languages spoken as well. [5] Some prefer to identify as dopii and their dialect as dopia which mean local or indigenous in Greek. However, you do not need to speak or read Greek to research Greek records. The Greek language holds an important place in the history of the Western world and Christianity; the canon of ancient Greek literature includes works in the Western canon such as the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey. It is the official language of Greece (Hellas) and Cyprus. It was also widely used in … Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, in what are today Southern Italy, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and Libya; in the area of the Black Sea, in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia, Monoikos, and Mainake. [31] The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek. This refers to the hybrid Greco-Turkish dialect spoken by the so-called Urums or those who define themselves as Greek from the Tsalka (mainly Pontians) region of central Georgia and also to the Greco-Tatar dialect spoken by ethnic Greeks in Ukraine and the Crimea.