It was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms, for most of their history. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. According to one estimation, "Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English". The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasised. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek, used today for all official purposes and in education.

The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. 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. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian) or the Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan), but little definitive evidence has been found. The ancient language most closely related to it may be Ancient Macedonian, which, by most accounts, was a distinct dialect of Greek itself, related to the Northwest Doric group.

The Beginning of the Classical Style in Ancient Greek Sculpture

The Greek language is the oldest recorded living language and its vocabulary has been the basis of many languages, including English as well as international scientific nomenclature. The Greek language serves as a living testament to a culture and history that has profoundly shaped Western civilization. Today, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and is one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. The dative case exists in ancient forms but has been largely phased out in modern usage. The Greek language, known as “Ελληνικά” (Elliniká) in Greek, stands as one of the world’s oldest recorded living languages.

• The Byzantine Greeks’ essential values were drawn from both Christianity and the Homeric tradition of ancient Greece.
• The Greeks had cultural traits, a religion, and a language in common, though they spoke many dialects.
• Today, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and is one of the 24 official languages of the European Union.
• The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC.

Under the Roman Empire, easier movement of people spread Greeks across the Empire and in the eastern territories, Greek became the lingua franca rather than Latin. The Hellenistic period is characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization that established Greek cities and kingdoms in Asia and Africa. Under Alexander the Great's empire and successor states, Greek and Hellenizing ruling classes were established in the Middle East, India and in Egypt. Integration, intermarriage, and loss of the Greek language influence the self-identification of the Greek diaspora (omogenia). The English names Greece and Greek are derived, via the Latin Graecia and Graecus, from the name of the Graeci (Γραικοί, Graikoí; singular Γραικός, Graikós), who were among the first ancient Greek tribes to settle southern Italy (the so-called "Magna Graecia").

It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet, with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. Another similar system used to write the Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek. It is basically a syllabary, which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A, has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). During the older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word.

The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world.

Greece’s Education Spending Remains Among Lowest in EU

Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages. Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are highly-influential on the English language and remain the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary. They show that one corner of cajun curly fries one island of Greece, at least, was neither impoverished nor isolated in a period usually thought to have been both. Phenomena such as the tension between Dorians and Ionians that have their origins in the Dark Age are a reminder that Greek civilization did not emerge either unannounced or uncontaminated by what had gone before. Equally important to the understanding of this period is the hostility to Dorians, usually on the part of Ionians, another linguistic and religious subgroup, whose most-famous city was Athens. Important for the understanding of the Archaic and Classical periods, however, is the powerful belief in Dorianism as a linguistic and religious concept.

Genetics

“Colonial” Greek survived longest at Byzantium, as the official language of the Eastern Empire. After the conquest of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt by Alexander the Great, Greek was the standard language of the rulers in the new urban centres of these countries until the invasions of the Arabs and the Turks. Modern Greek υ (ípsilon) is transliterated as i, indicating that the sound used today differs from that of the ancient υ.

During the later years of the Eastern Roman Empire, areas such as Ionia and Constantinople experienced a Hellenic revival in language, philosophy, and literature and on classical models of thought and scholarship. The large Greek diaspora and merchant class were instrumental in transmitting the ideas of western romantic nationalism and philhellenism, which together with the conception of Hellenism, formulated during the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire, formed the basis of the Diafotismos and the current conception of Hellenism. Before the establishment of the modern Greek nation-state, the link between ancient and modern Greeks was emphasized by the scholars of Greek Enlightenment especially by Rigas Feraios.

Greek Alphabet

A genetic study by Clemente et al. (2021) found that in the Early Bronze Age, the populations of the Minoan, Helladic, and Cycladic civilizations in the Aegean, were genetically homogeneous. In a subsequent study, Lazaridis et al. (2022) concluded that around ~58.4–65.8% of the ancestry of the Mycenaeans came from Anatolian Neolithic Farmers (ANF), while the remainder mainly came from ancient populations related to the Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG) (~20.1–22.7%) and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) culture in the Levant (~7–14%). In their archaeogenetic study, Lazaridis et al. (2017) found that Minoans and Mycenaean Greeks were genetically highly similar, but not identical; modern Greeks resembled the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the early Neolithic ancestry. Panayotis Potagos was another explorer of modern times who was the first to reach Mbomu and Uele River from the north. Greek surnames began to appear in the 9th and 10th century, at first among ruling families, eventually supplanting the ancient tradition of using the father's name as disambiguator.

The Greek Polyglot Who Speaks 32 Languages

Ancient Greek civilization flourished from the period following Mycenaean civilization, which ended about 1200 BCE, to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BCE. Ancient Greek civilization was concentrated in what is today Greece and along the western coast of Turkey. The ancestry of the Mycenaeans could be explained via a 2-way admixture model of such MBA individuals in northern Greece, and either an EBA Aegean or MBA Minoan population; the difference between the two time periods could be explained by the general decline of the Mycenaean civilization. The results of the study support the idea of genetic continuity between these civilizations and modern Greeks, but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.