Greek

Where it’s spoken

Modern Greek (Νέα Ελληνικά) is the official language of Greece and Cyprus, and has historical communities in Albania, Italy (Griko), Egypt, Russia, and Australia. Strong Greek diasporas thrive in the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia. Cypriot Greek differs noticeably from Standard Modern Greek but is mutually intelligible.

What it sounds like

Modern Greek has five vowels and a phonology simpler than Classical Greek’s — pitch accent became stress accent, vowel length was lost, and many distinct ancient vowels merged into /i/ (a phenomenon called iotacism). The voiced and voiceless dental fricatives (δ, θ) survive from antiquity.

How it’s written

Greek uses its own alphabet of 24 letters, which descended from the Phoenician abjad in the 9th century BCE and was the first script to consistently mark vowels. Modern Greek dropped the polytonic accent system in 1982 in favor of a single tonos mark.

History

Greek has been continuously written since the Linear B tablets of the 13th century BCE. The Koine Greek of Hellenistic times spread the language across the Mediterranean. Modern Greek emerged from medieval Byzantine demotic, with the artificial Katharevousa register competing with vernacular Demotic until the 1976 standardization on Demotic.