Greek

Greek, the language of one of the major civilisations and one of the greatest literatures of the world, forms its own independent branch of the Indo-European language family and has no close living relatives.

Of all the living Indo-European languages, it is most closely related to Armenian. It has been spoken in the southern Balkans since the early part of the second millennium BC and has a documented history that goes back 3,500 years, the longest in the Indo-European family. The earliest written evidence of Greek is found in Mycenaean Greek documents found on Crete and later on the Greek mainland which were written in the Linear B syllabary.

Modern Greek is a descendant of Proto-Greek, the ancestor of the ancient Greek dialects that were spoken in different areas of Greece before the 4th century BC and which were gradually superseded a variety of Greek called Common Greek or Koine, based on the Attic dialect spoken around Athens.

The history of the Greek language is usually divided into the following periods characterised by political and linguistic factors:

•   Mycenaean Greek, was the language of the Mycenaean civilisation (16th century BC onward).
•   Classical (or Ancient) Greek, known throughout the Roman empire, was the language of the Classical period of Greek civilisation. Classical Greek fell into disuse in western Europe in the Middle Ages, but remained known in the Byzantine Empire, and was reintroduced to the rest of Europe with the Fall of Constantinople and Greek migration to Italy.
•   Hellenistic (Koine) Greek, a fusion of of various Greek dialects with the dialect of Athens, was a common Greek dialect that became one of the world's first lingua francas.
•   Medieval (Byzantine) Greek was the literary language of the Byzantine Empire that was used until its fall in the 15th century AD.
•   Modern Greek developed from Koine Greek.

Greek is spoken by about 12 million people worldwide, principally in Greece and Cyprus, but also in many other countries where there are Greek immigrants. Greek is the official language of the Greek Republic where it is spoken by about 10 million people (Ethnologue). It is also the co-official language of Cyprus along with Turkish. Greek is one of the 20 official languages of the European Union.

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