Greek is an archaic Indo-European language with a long history. The language itself developed over the centuries into the modern Greek spoken by approximately 14 million people in Greece and Cyprus, as well as Greek speaking communities in other countries.

In spite of the fact that its morphological system was restructured many times, its cohesion remains stable. The changes it went through since 800 B.C. are particularly small, especially in its written form. There is a very high percentage of words in the various fields of vocabulary that have remained the same since pre-historic times until today. One sixth of the words used in the Homeric poems are still used today, half of the words used in the New Testament are in use in modern Greek, and almost all the words in it are understood by contemporary Greeks.

The Doric dialect originally spoken in Northern Greece, expanded to Peloponnese, the Cyclades, Crete and the Greek colonies of Asia Minor, Sicily and Italy.

Aeolic, was spoken principally in the district of Aeolis, Thessaly and Boeotia. It was the language of the poets Alcaeus and Sappho.

The Ionic dialect was spoken mainly on the islands of the Aegean and on most of the western shores of Asia Minor. It was employed in the writings of the physician Hippocrates and the historian Herodotus.

From the Ionic dialect developed the Attic, the standard form of Classical Greek. It was the language of Athens and the surrounding district of Attica. Because of the political supremacy of Athens during and after the 5^th century B.C. and the dominant role of Athenian art, philosophy and drama, the Attic dialect superseded the others and became the chief literary language. It was the language of the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the orator Demosthenes, the philosopher Plato and the historians Thoukidides and Xenophon.

The Macedonian court made it its official language. With the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4^th century B.C the attic dialect became the language of all the Middle East. As the Greeks mixed with other peoples, linguistic changes took place and Attic became the foundation of a new form of Greek called Koine (meaning simple) which was a simplified form of the Attic dialect with a some Ionic and Doric elements. The four Gospels of the New Testament are written in a form of Koine with a strong Semitic admixture.

In the 15^th century A.D., a little before the fall of Constantinople, the language had evolved into something quite similar to modern Greek.

The main characteristic of Greek is the existence of two variations, the demotike (popular) and the katharevousa (purist). The first is used in everyday life and is the evolved form of ancient Greek transmitted orally, while the second is the written form that continued the phenomenon of Atticism and is closer to the written form of ancient Greek. Katharevousa was never spoken but has influenced the spoken form to a great extent and in the last decades, the two forms have started getting closer. After long disputes among the scholars demotike became the official language of the Greek State in 1976.

Greek is the only language in the European Union to be written with its own alphabet. The orthography of the language is historical-etymological, which means that the writing is quite different from the pronunciation. Most grammatical rules are the same as in the Attic dialect. However over the last fifteen years some grammatical endings were simplified and the so-called multi-stress system of writing evolved into single-stress. So, today, words with more than two syllables, have only one stress mark (΄) on the syllable to be stressed, e.g.: δημοκρατία (=democracy).

Words end mainly with a vowel or a combination of vowels, as well as with the consonants ς (s) and ν (n). No other consonant can be found in the end of a word, except in the cases of foreign loans.

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