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Greek (Modern Greek: Ελληνικά, romanized: Elliniká, pronounced; Ancient Greek: Ἑλληνική, romanized: Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy (in Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet , [ 5 ] and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants .
Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions.
Modern Greek (endonym: Νέα Ελληνικά, Néa Elliniká, [ˈne.a eliniˈka] or Κοινή Νεοελληνική Γλώσσα, Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (Ελληνικά, Elliniká), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the language sometimes ...
The distribution of major modern Greek dialect areas. Modern Greek language (Νεοελληνική γλώσσα) is the only official language of the Hellenic Republic, and is spoken by some 99.5% of the population — about 11,100,000 people [3] (though not necessarily as a first language).
The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late ...
The Proto-Greek language was the most recent common ancestor of all Greek dialects. Proto-Greek split off from its nearest Indo-European relatives sometime during the European Bronze Age (c. 3rd millennium BC) and possibly even earlier, though it is unknown whether the characteristic Greek sound-changes occurred within the Greek peninsula or if Proto-Greek speakers themselves migrated into Greece.
Varieties of Modern Greek. The linguistic varieties of Modern Greek can be classified along two principal dimensions. First, there is a long tradition of sociolectal variation between the natural, popular spoken language on the one hand and archaizing, learned written forms on the other. Second, there is regional variation between dialects.