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Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, [18] or possibly earlier. [19] The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, [20] making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. [21]
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.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [2] [3] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [4] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. [5]
Greek Sign Language (Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα) is the sign language of the Greek deaf community. It has been legally recognised as the official language of the Deaf Community in Greece and is estimated to be used by about 42,000 signers (12,000 children and 30,000 active adult users) in 1986.
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 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.
In most classifications, Hellenic consists of Greek alone, [3] [4] but some linguists use the term Hellenic to refer to a group consisting of Greek proper and other varieties thought to be related but different enough to be separate languages, either among ancient neighboring languages [5] or among modern varieties of Greek. [6]
Greek is a largely synthetic (inflectional) language. Although the complexity of the inflectional system has been somewhat reduced in comparison to Ancient Greek, there is also a considerable degree of continuity in the morphological system, and Greek still has a somewhat archaic character compared with other Indo-European languages of Europe. [8]