

It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora. In its modern form, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics.ĭuring antiquity, Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in 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 an important place in the history of the Western world. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records.

Greek ( Modern Greek: Ελληνικά, romanized: Elliniká Ancient Greek: Ἑλληνική, romanized: Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, Albania, and the other parts of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, and the Eastern Mediterranean. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. (The map does not indicate where the language is majority or minority.) Areas where Modern Greek is spoken (in dark blue those areas where it is the official language).
