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Greek Language

The Greek Language Program contains 27 hours of audio, and three textbooks in PDF file format with 762 pages.

Greek is the official language of the present day kingdom of Greece. More than 95 percent of its population are native speakers of Greek. Other languages spoken in Greece are those of small minorities: Turkish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Sephardic (spoken mainly in Thessaloniki by the descendents of Jews formerly residing in Spain and Portugal), Albanian and some others.

Outside the limits of Greece Greek is spoken in the neighboring islands, such as Bozca Ada and Imbroz (Turkey), Cyprus, as well as in surrounding countries, e.g. southern Albania, southern Yugoslavia, BUlgaria and Turkey (Istanbul). It is also spoken by large Greek communities in the Americas (U.S.A., Canada, Argentina, Brazil), in Europe, Africa and Australia.

Like English, Greek belongs to the large Indo-Hittite (Indo-European) family of languages and spread over the Balkan peninsula sometime during the second millenium B.C.

Ancient Greek appears to have been divided into four main groups of dialects: Arcadian-Cypriotic, Dorian, Aeolian and Ionian-Attic. Beginning in the 4th century B.C. the Ionian-Attic dialect spread allover the Greek speaking territories while other dialects began to decline and then disappeared completely in the'first centuries of the Christian era.

Modern Greek presents a rather complex linguistic picture. On the one hand this language is the re8~lt of a normal linguistic evolution from the older Greek; on the other hand, however, intense nationalistic sentiments during certain periods of Greek history have preserved intact many morphological, syntactic and lexical elements of archaic Greek. As a result there are two broad types of language used in modern Greece, the Ipopularl,or dhimotiki, and the 'formal', or katharevusa. The former is the every-day language of the people containing loanwords from other languages which have been incorporated into the Greek language in the course of later Greek history. 'Dhimotiki' is primarily a spoken language, that of Greek songs and ballads, and does not have a fixed orthography, but is largely used by modern writers of poetry and fiction.

The latter (katharevusa) is a conscious and artificial return to older Greek, and is taught in schools and used for official purposes and in a more or less 'pure' form by newspapers.

Since the 2nd century B.C. the Greeks have disputed among ,themselves about their language. At that time literary men scorned colloquial usage, consciously imitating the classical style in their works. The schism has continued to our days.