Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

3
LANGUAGE, ALPHABET,
AND LITERACY
THE ORIGINS OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE
AND LINEAR B
By the thirteenth century b.c.e. , at the very latest, the inhabitants of
the Greek mainland and the island of Crete were speaking Greek.
Indeed, some scholars, from the analysis of place names and archaeological
data, believe that Greek speakers (or people speaking proto-
Greek) had arrived by 2000 b.c.e. This makes Greek the oldest of all
European languages with a continuous history lasting at least 3,300
years, possibly even 4,000 years. Although its origins are unclear, it
belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, which extends
from Iceland to Bangladesh. This includes Latin and all the Romance
languages, the Germanic languages, Sanskrit, and many others.
Until the Hellenistic Period, Greek existed in a number of different
dialects, the most important of which were Aeolic, Doric, Ionic,
and Attic. These dialects do not, however, invariably correspond to
ethnic divisions within the Greek “race.” For instance, the inhabitants
of Halikarnassos, modern Bodrùm on the Turkish coast, who
were Dorians, spoke in an Ionic dialect. Following the conquests of
Alexander the Great, a dialect called koinê, or “common,” became
the educated tongue of the entire Hellenistic world. Koinê is the dialect
in which the New Testament is written.