Modern Greek

Discovering the language

Greek is one of the most traceable languages in history. The features that characterize the modern idiom are already in place at the beginning of the Christian era, but the evolution of the language is constant, and many of the phenomena that characterize modern Greek see their appearance spread over the entire medieval period, with varying areal distributions according to regional dialects. Modern Greek did not stabilize until the 1975 reform, which put an end to a long diglossic period characterized by the dichotomy between purist Greek, modeled on the classical Attic dialect, and common, literary Greek, known as demotic Greek. The post-diglossic period saw the gradual establishment of normative references for modern Greek. This new standard koinè draws on the many layers of its history. It thus preserves the vast arsenal of productive processes (through suffixation and composition) that contribute to lexical creativity and the expression of its various registers, which remain of great vitality.