Ancient Greek dialects

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Distribution of Greek dialects in Greek in the classical period.[1]

Western group:
Doric proper
Northwest Doric
Achaean Doric
Central group:
Aeolic
Arcado-Cypriot
Eastern group:
Attic
Ionic
Ancient Greek in classical antiquity, before the development of the ????? (koin�)
"common" language of Hellenism, was divided into several dialects. Most of them are
known only from inscriptions, but a few of them, principally Aeolic, Doric, and
Ionic, are also represented in the literary canon alongside the dominant Attic form
of literary Greek. Likewise, Modern Greek is divided into several dialects, most of
them having been derived from Koine Greek.

Contents [hide]
1 Provenance
2 Literature
3 Classification
3.1 Ancient classification
3.2 Modern classification
4 Phonology
4.1 Hiatus
4.2 A
4.3 Ablaut
5 Post-Hellenistic
6 Notes
6.1 Overviews
6.2 Inscriptions
Provenance[edit]
The earliest known Greek dialect is Mycenaean Greek, the language reconstructed
from the Linear B tablets produced by the Mycenaean civilization of the Late Bronze
Age in the late 2nd millennium BC. The classical distribution of dialects was
brought about by the migrations of the early Iron Age[2] after the collapse of the
Mycenaean civilization. Some speakers of Mycenaean were displaced to Cyprus while
others remained inland in Arcadia, giving rise to the Arcadocypriot dialect. This
is the only dialect with a known Bronze-age precedent. The other dialects must have
preceded their attested forms but the relationship of the precedents to Mycenaean
remains to be discovered.
Aeolic was spoken in three subdialects: one, Lesbian, on the island of Lesbos and
the west coast of Asia Minor north of Smyrna. The other two, Boeotian and
Thessalian, were spoken in the northeast of the Greek mainland (in Boeotia and
Thessalia).
The Dorian invasion spread Doric Greek from a probable location in northwestern
Greece to the coast of the Peloponnesus; for example, to Sparta, to Crete and to
the southernmost parts of the west coast of Asia Minor. North Western Greek is
sometimes classified as a separate dialect, and is sometimes subsumed under Doric.
Macedonian is regarded by some scholars as another Greek dialect, possibly related
to Doric or NW Greek.[3][4][5][6][7][8]
Ionic was mostly spoken along the west coast of Asia Minor, including Smyrna and
the area to the south of it, but also in Euboea. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were
written in Homeric Greek (or Epic Greek), an early East Greek blending Ionic and
Aeolic features. Attic Greek, a sub- or sister-dialect of Ionic, was for centuries
the language of Athens. Because Attic was adopted in Macedon before the conquests
of Alexander the Great and the subsequent rise of Hellenism, it became the
"standard" dialect that evolved into the Koin�.
Literature[edit]
See also: Category:Ancient Greek writers by dialect
Ancient Greek literature is written in literary dialects that developed from
particular regional or archaic dialects. Ancient Greek authors did not necessarily
write in their native dialect, but rather chose a dialect that was suitable or
traditional for the type of literature they were writing (see belles-lettres).[9]
[10] All dialects have poetry written in them, but only Attic and Ionic have full
works of prose attested.

Homeric Greek is used in the first epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the
Homeric Hymns, traditionally attributed to Homer and written in dactylic hexameter.
Homeric is a literary dialect with elements of Ionic, Aeolic and Arcadocypriot.
Hesiod uses a similar dialect, and later writers imitate Homer in their epics, such
as Apollonius Rhodius in Argonautica and Nonnus in Dionysiaca.[11] Homer influenced
other types of poetry as well.

Ionic proper is first used in Archilochus of Paros. This dialect includes also the
earliest Greek prose, that of Heraclitus and Ionic philosophers, Hecataeus and
logographers, Herodotus, Democritus, and Hippocrates. Elegiac poetry originated in
Ionia and always continued to be written in Ionic.[12][13]

Doric is the conventional dialect of choral lyric poetry, which includes the
Laconian Alcman, the Theban Pindar and the choral songs of Attic tragedy (stasima).
Several lyric and epigrammatic poets wrote in this dialect, such as Ibycus of
Rhegium and Leonidas of Tarentum. The following authors wrote in Doric, preserved
in fragments: Epicharmus comic poet and writers of South Italian Comedy (phlyax
play), Mithaecus food writer and Archimedes.

Aeolic is an exclusively poetic lyric dialect, represented by Sappho and Alcaeus

for Lesbian (Aeolic) and Corinna of Tanagra for Boeotian.

Thessalic (Aeolic), Northwest Doric, Arcado-Cypriot and Pamphylian never became

literary dialects and are only known from inscriptions, and to some extent by the
comical parodies of Aristophanes and lexicographers.

Attic proper was used by the Attic orators, Lysias, Isocrates, Aeschines and
Demosthenes, the philosophers Plato and Aristotle and the historian Xenophon.
Thucydides wrote in Old Attic. The tragic playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides wrote in an artificial poetic language,[14] and the comic playwright
Aristophanes writes in a language with vernacular elements.

Classification[edit]
Ancient classification[edit]
The ancients classified the language into three gene or four dialects, Ionic
proper, Ionic (Attic), Aeolic, Doric and later a fifth one, Koine.[15][16]
Grammarians focus mainly on the literary dialects and isolated words. Historians
may classify dialects on mythological/historical reasons rather than linguistic
knowledge. According to Strabo, "Ionic is the same as Attic and Aeolic the same as
Doric - Outside the Isthmus, all Greeks were Aeolians except the Athenians, the
Megarians and the Dorians who live about Parnassus - In the Peloponnese, Achaeans
were also Aeolians but only Eleans and Arcadians continued to speak Aeolic".[17]
However, for most ancients, Aeolic was synonymous with literary Lesbic.[18]
Stephanus of Byzantium characterized Boeotian as Aeolic and Aetolian as Doric.[19]
Remarkable is the ignorance of sources, except lexicographers, on Arcadian, Cypriot
and Pamphylian.
Finally, unlike Modern Greek[20] and English, Ancient Greek common terms for human
speech ( 'gl�ssa',[21] 'dialektos',[22] 'ph�ne'[23] and the suffix '-isti' ) may be
attributed interchangeably to both a dialect and a language. However, the plural
'dialektoi' is used when dialects and peculiar words are compared and listed by the
grammarians under the terms 'lexeis'[24] or 'gl�ssai'.[25]

Modern classification[edit]
The dialects of Classical Antiquity are grouped slightly differently by various
authorities. Pamphylian is a marginal dialect of Asia Minor and is sometimes left
uncategorized. Mycenaean was deciphered only in 1952 and so is missing from the
earlier schemes presented here:

Northwestern, Southeastern Ernst Risch, Museum Helveticum (1955):

Northern Greek
Doric/North-Western Greek
Aeolic
Pamphylian?
Southern Greek
Ionic-Arcadian-Cypriot-Mycenaean
Alfred Heubeck:
Northwestern group
Doric/North-Western Greek
Aeolic?
Southeastern group
Ionic-Attic
Arcadocypriot
Western,
Central,
Eastern A. Thumb, E. Kieckers,
Handbuch der griechischen Dialekte (1932):
Western Greek
Doric dialects
dialect of Achaea
dialect of Elis
North-Western Greek
Central Greek
Aeolic
Boiotic
Thessalic
Lesbic
Arcadocyprian
Eastern Greek
Ionic
Attic
Pamphylian
W. Porzig, Die Gliederung des indogermanischen Sprachgebiets (1954):
Western Greek
North-Western Greek
Doric
Aeolic
Eastern Greek
Ionic-Attic
Arcadocypriot
East Greek
West Greek C.D. Buck, The Greek Dialects (1955):[26]
East Greek
The Attic-Ionic Group
Attic
Ionic
East Ionic
Central Ionic
West Ionic or Euboean
The Arcado-Cyprian Group
Arcadian
Cyprian
Pamphylian
The Aeolic Group
Lesbian
Thessalian
Boeotian
West Greek
The North-West Greek Group
Phocian (including Delphian)
Locrian
Elean
The Northwest Greek koine
The Doric Group
Laconian and Heraclean
Messenian
Megarian
Corinthian
Argolic
Rhodian
Coan
Theran and Cyrenaean
Cretan
Sicilian Doric
Phonology[edit]
The Ancient Greek dialects differed mainly in vowels.

Hiatus[edit]
Loss of intervocalic s and consonantal i and w from Proto-Greek brought two vowels
together in hiatus, a circumstance often called a "collision of vowels".[27] Over
time, Greek speakers would change pronunciation to avoid such a collision, and the
way that vowels changed determined the dialect.

For example, the word for the "god of the sea" (regardless of the culture and
language from which it came) was in some prehistoric form *poseidawon (genitive
*poseidawonos). Loss of the intervocalic *w left poseidaon, which is found in both
Mycenaean and Homeric dialects. Ionic Greek changed the *a to an e (poseideon),
while Attic Greek contracted it to poseidon. It changed differently in other
dialects:[citation needed]

Corinthian: potedawoni > potedani and potedan

Boeotian: poteidaoni
Cretan, Rhodian and Delphian: poteidan
Lesbian: poseidan
Arcadian: posoidanos
Laconian: pohoidan
The changes appear designed to place one vowel phoneme instead of two, a process
called "contraction", if a third phoneme is created, and "hyphaeresis" ("taking
away") if one phoneme is dropped and the other kept. Sometimes, the two phonemes
are kept, sometimes modified, as in the Ionic poseideon.

A[edit]
A vowel shift differentiating the Ionic and Attic dialects from the rest was the
shift of a to e. In Ionic, the change occurred in all positions, but in Attic, it
occurred almost everywhere except after e, i, and r. Homeric Greek shows the Ionic
rather than the Attic version of the vowel shift for the most part. Doric and
Aeolic show the original forms with a.[28]

Attic and Ionic meter; Doric mater "mother"[29] (compare Latin mater)
Attic neanias; Ionic neenies "young man"[30]
Ablaut[edit]
Another principle of vocalic dialectization follows the Indo-European ablaut series
or vowel grades. The Proto-Indo-European language could interchange e (e-grade)
with o (o-grade) or use neither (zero-grade). Similarly, Greek inherited the
series, for example, ei, oi, i, which are e-, o- and zero-grades of the diphthong
respectively. They could appear in different verb forms (leipo "I leave", leloipa
"I have left", elipon "I left") or be used as the basis of dialectization: Attic
deiknumi "I point out" but Cretan diknumi.

Post-Hellenistic[edit]
Main article: Varieties of Modern Greek
The ancient Greek dialects were a result of isolation and poor communication
between communities living in broken terrain. All general Greek historians point
out the influence of terrain on the development of the city-states. Often, the
development of languages dialectization results in the dissimilation of daughter
languages. That phase did not occur in Greek; instead the dialects were replaced by
Standard Greek.

Increasing population and communication brought speakers more closely in touch and
united them under the same authorities. Attic Greek became the literary language
everywhere. Buck says:[31]

"� long after Attic had become the norm of literary prose, each state employed its
own dialect, both in private and public monuments of internal concern, and in those
of a more� interstate character, such as� treaties�."
In the first few centuries BC, regional dialects replaced local ones: Northwest
Greek koine, Doric koine and Attic koine. The last came to replace the others in
common speech in the first few centuries AD. After the division of the Roman Empire
into the east and the west the earliest Modern Greek prevailed. The dialect
distribution was then as follows:

Attic Greek
Koin�
Byzantine Greek language
Modern Greek
Demotic Greek
Katharevousa
Yevanic
Cypriot Greek
Cretan Greek
Southern Italian Greek (Griko and Calabrian/Bovesian), retaining some Doric
elements
Pontic Greek, retaining some Ionic elements
Cappadocian Greek
Romano-Greek
Doric Greek
Doric Koin�
Tsakonian
According to some scholars, Tsakonian is the only modern Greek dialect that
descends from Doric, albeit with some influence from the Koine.[32] Others include
the Southern Italian dialects in this group, though perhaps they should rather be
regarded as descended from the local Doric-influenced variant of the Koine.[33]
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ Roger D. Woodard (2008), "Greek dialects", in: The Ancient Languages of
Europe, ed. R. D. Woodard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 51.
Jump up ^ Sometimes called the Greek Dark Ages because writing disappeared from
Greece until the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet.
Jump up ^ Masson, Olivier (2003) [1996]. "[Ancient] Macedonian language". In
Hornblower, S. and Spawforth A. (eds.). The Oxford Classical Dictionary (revised
3rd ed.). USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 905�906. ISBN 0-19-860641-9.
Jump up ^ Hammond, N.G.L (1993) [1989]. The Macedonian State. Origins, Institutions
and History (reprint ed.). USA: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-814927-1.
Jump up ^ Michael Meier-Br�gger, Indo-European linguistics, Walter de Gruyter,
2003, p.28, on Google books
Jump up ^ Roisman, Worthington, 2010, "A Companion to Ancient Macedonia", Chapter
5: Johannes Engels, "Macedonians and Greeks", p. 95:"This (i.e. Pella curse tablet)
has been judged to be the most important ancient testimony to substantiate that
Macedonian was a north-western Greek and mainly a Doric dialect".
Jump up ^ "...but we may tentatively conclude that Macedonian is a dialect related
to North-West Greek.", Olivier Masson, French linguist, �Oxford Classical
Dictionary: Macedonian Language�, 1996.
Jump up ^ Masson & Dubois 2000, p. 292: "...<<Macedonian Language>> de l'Oxford
Classical Dictionary, 1996, p. 906: <<Macedonian may be seen as a Greek dialect,
characterized by its marginal position and by local pronunciation (like ????????
for ???????? etc.)>>."
Jump up ^ Greek mythology and poetics By Gregory Nagy. Page 51] ISBN 978-0-8014-
8048-5 (1992)
Jump up ^ Sihler, Andrew Littleton (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and
Latin. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 10�12. ISBN 0-19-508345-8.
Jump up ^ Homer and the epic: a shortened version of The songs of Homer By Geoffrey
Stephen Kirk Page 76 (1965)
Jump up ^ A History of Greek Literature: From the Earliest Period to the Death of
Demosthenes by Frank Byron Jevons (1894) Page 112
Jump up ^ A History of Classical Greek Literature: Volume 2. The Prose Writers
(Paperback) by John Pentland Mahaffy Page 194 ISBN 1-4021-7041-6
Jump up ^ Helen By Euripides, William Allan Page 43 ISBN 0-521-54541-2 (2008)
Jump up ^ New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity: Volume 5, Linguistic
Essays With Cumulative Indexes to Vols. 1-5 Page 30 ISBN 0-8028-4517-7 (2001)
Jump up ^ History Of The Language Sciences By Sylvain Auroux Page 440 ISBN 3-11-
016736-0 (2000)
Jump up ^ Strabo 8.1.2 14.5.26
Jump up ^ Mendez Dosuna, The Aeolic dialects
Jump up ^ Stephanus of Byzantium, Ethnika s.v. Ionia
Jump up ^ glossa: language, dialektos: dialect, fon� : voice
Jump up ^ LSJ gl�ssa Archived December 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
Jump up ^ LSJ:dialektos Archived December 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
Jump up ^ LSJ ph�ne Archived December 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
Jump up ^ LSJ lexis Archived December 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
Jump up ^ Ataktoi Gl�ssai (Disorderly Words) by Philitas of Cos
Jump up ^ First published in 1928, it was revised and expanded by Buck and
republished in 1955, the year of his death. Of the new edition Buck said (Preface):
this is virtually a new book." There have been other impressions, but no further
changes to the text. The 1955 edition was at the time and to some degree still is
the standard text on the subject in the United States. This part of the table is
based on the Introduction to the 1955 edition. An example of a modern use of this
classification can be found at columbia.edu as Richard C. Carrier's The Major Greek
Dialects Archived October 6, 2006, at the Wayback Machine.
Jump up ^ Two vowels together are not to be confused with a diphthong, which is two
vowel sounds within the same syllable, often spelled with two letters. Greek
diphthongs were typically inherited from Proto-Indo-European.
Jump up ^ Smyth, Greek Grammar, paragraph 30 on CCEL: vowel change involving e, a
Jump up ^ �????
Jump up ^ ???????
Jump up ^ Greek Dialects[page needed]
Jump up ^ Medieval and modern Greek By Robert Browning Page 124 ISBN 0-521-29978-0
(1983)
Jump up ^ Browning, ibid.
Overviews[edit]
Griechische Dialekte und ihre Verteilung, Titus site, in German. List, map, table
of features.
Dialects of Greek, Kelley L. Ross. Map and brief description.
Excerpts from Margalit Finkelburg, "Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and
Greek Heroic Tradition" (PDF). (162 KiB). One of the topics is the origin of the
dialects.
Inscriptions[edit]
Searchable Greek Inscriptions. A considerable corpus of ancient Greek inscriptions
in various dialects published by The Packard Humanities Institute.
Inscriptions Listed by Region, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents site.
[show] v t e
Ancient Greece
[show] v t e
Greek language
Categories: Varieties of Ancient GreekIron Age Greece
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