History of the Greek Language

Koine Greek is part of the legacy left byThe Greek language including Attic and Modern
Alexander the Great's imperial conquests whichGreek, is written in a non-Latin script. Greek is
united Asia Minor, the north of &rica, and the vastone of the richest surviving languages in the world
territories of the Persian empire. Though his deathtoday, with a vocabulary more than 600,000
saw the end of the empire he had forged, therewords. Some scholars have stressed the similarity
remained a common Greek language, Koine, thatof Modern Greek to millennia old Greek languages.
continued to be spoken in the lands he conquered.The extent of Modern Greek's commonality with
This became the common language of theancient Greek has been extensively reviewed and
Mediterranean basin and the ancestor of Moderndebated. It is claimed that a "reasonably well
Greek.educated" speaker of the modern tongue can
The Greek language, as we know it today, had itsread the ancient dialects, but it is not made very
origin during the classical era, though it hasclear how much of that education consists of
undergone a considerable number of changes. Inexposure to vocabulary and grammar obsolete in
our day, in its modern form, demotik?r 'popular'normal communication.
Greek is the official language of Greece andThe Greek language spoken in both in the
Cyprus. It is also a recognized minority language inHellenistic and Byzantine eras is nearer to Modern
Italy, Turkey, and Albania.Greek. From 1934 to 1976 there was an attempt
Greek is part of the Indo-European family ofto impose a purified language, an attempt to
languages. The earliest form of Greek is thoughtcorrect centuries of natural linguistic changes) as
to have originated in the 14th century BCE inthe only acceptable form of Greek in Greece.
Cretan inscriptions. Mycenaean Greek isAfter 1976, Dimoti'ci, "speech of the people" was
distinguished from later Classical or Greek of thefinally accepted by the Greek government as
8th century BCE and after, when texts came toboth the de facto and de jure forms of the
be written in the Greek alphabet.language. A large number of words and
Various theories about the origins of the Greekexpressions have remained unchanged through
language exist. One suggests that it originatedthe centuries, and have found their way into a
with a migration of proto-Greek speakers intonumber of other languages, among them Latin,
Greece, which is dated to any period betweenItalian, German, French and English. Some
3200 BC to 1900 BC. Another theory holds thatexamples of these include mostly terminology
Greek evolved in Greece itself out of an earlynames, such as astronomy, philosophy,
language of Indo-European origin.democracy and anthropology.