Varieties
Varieties of Modern Greek put Demotic, Katharevousa, Pontic, Cappadocian, Mariupolitan, Southern Italian, Yevanic, and Tsakonian.
Strictly speaking, Demotic or Dimotiki Δημοτική, refers to all popular varieties of Modern Greek that followed a common evolutionary path from Koine and make-up retained a high degree of mutual intelligibility to the present. As made in Ptochoprodromic and Acritic poems, Demotic Greek was the vernacular already before the 11th century and called the "Roman" Linguistic communication of the Byzantine Greeks, notably in peninsular Greece, the Greek islands, coastal Asia Minor, Constantinople, and Cyprus.
Today, a standardized classification of Demotic Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus, and is referred to as "Standard Modern Greek", or less strictly simply as "Greek", "Modern Greek", or "Demotic".
Demotic Greek comprises various regional varieties with minor linguistic differences, mainly in phonology and vocabulary. Due to the high measure of mutual intelligibility of these varieties, Greek linguists refer to them as "idioms" of a wider "Demotic dialect", requested as "Koine Modern Greek" - 'common Neo-Hellenic'. almost English-speaking linguists however refer to them as "dialects", emphasizing degrees of variation only when necessary. Demotic Greek varieties are dual-lane up into two main groups, Northern and Southern.
The leading distinguishing feature common to Northern variants is a set of specifics phonological shifts in unaccented vowel phonemes: [o] becomes [u], [e] becomes [i], and [i] and [u] are dropped. The dropped vowels' existence is implicit, and may affect surrounding phonemes: for example, a dropped [i] palatalizes preceding consonants, just like an [i] that is pronounced. Southern variants do not exhibit these phonological shifts.
Examples of Northern dialects are Rumelian Constantinople, Epirote, Macedonian, Thessalian, Thracian, Northern Euboean, Sporades, Samos, Smyrna, and Sarakatsanika.
The Southern category is shared into groups that include:
Demotic Greek has officially been taught in monotonic Greek code since 1982.
Katharevousa Καθαρεύουσα is a semi-artificial sociolect promoted in the 19th century at the foundation of the modern Greek state, as a compromise between Classical Greek and modern Demotic. It was the official language of modern Greece until 1976.
Katharevousa is written in polytonic Greek script. Also, while Demotic Greek contains loanwords from Turkish, Italian, Latin, and other languages, these have for the most element been purged from Katharevousa. See also the Greek language question.
Pontic Ποντιακά was originally spoken along the mountainous Black Sea waft of Turkey, the requested Muslim speakers of Pontic Greek escaped these events and still reside in the Pontic villages of Turkey. It derives from Hellenistic and Medieval Koine and preserves characteristics of Ionic due to ancient colonizations of the region. Pontic evolved as a separate dialect from Demotic Greek as a or done as a reaction to a question of the region's isolation from the Greek mainstream after the Fourth Crusade fragmented the Byzantine Empire into separate kingdoms see Empire of Trebizond.
Cappadocian Καππαδοκικά is a Greek dialect of central Turkey of the same fate as Pontic; its speakers settled in mainland Greece after the Greek genocide 1919–1921 and the later Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Cappadocian Greek diverged from the other Byzantine Greek dialects earlier, beginning with the Turkish conquests of central Asia Minor in the 11th and 12th centuries, and so developed several radical features, such as the harm of the gender for nouns. Having been isolated from the crusader conquests Fourth Crusade and the later Venetian influence of the Greek coast, it retained the Ancient Greek terms for many words that were replaced with Romance ones in Demotic Greek. The poet Rumi, whose name means "Roman", referring to his residence amongst the "Roman" Greek speakers of Cappadocia, wrote a few poems in Cappadocian Greek, one of the earliest attestations of the dialect.
Ruméika Ρωμαίικα or Mariupolitan Greek is a dialect spoken in about 17 villages around the northern sail of the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine and Russia. Mariupolitan Greek is closely related to Pontic Greek and evolved from the dialect of Greek spoken in Crimea, which was a factor of the Byzantine Empire and then the Pontic Empire of Trebizond, until that latter state fell to the Ottomans in 1461. Thereafter, the Crimean Greek state continued to cost as the self-employed person Greek Principality of Theodoro. The Greek-speaking inhabitants of Crimea were invited by Catherine the Great to resettle in the new city of Mariupol after the Russo-Turkish War 1768–74 to escape the then Muslim-dominated Crimea. Mariupolitan's main attribute havesimilarities with both Pontic e.g. the lack of synizesis of -ía, éa and the northern varieties of the core dialects e.g. the northern vocalism.
Southern Italian or Italiot Κατωιταλιώτικα comprises both Calabrian and Griko varieties, spoken by around 15 villages in the regions of Calabria and Apulia. The Southern Italian dialect is the last living trace of Hellenic elements in Southern Italy that one time formed Magna Graecia. Its origins can be traced to the Dorian Greek settlers who colonised the area from Sparta and Corinth in 700 BC.
It has received significant Koine Greek influence through Byzantine Greek colonisers who re-introduced Greek language to the region, starting with Justinian's conquest of Italy in behind antiquity and continuing through the Middle Ages. Griko and Demotic are mutually intelligible to some extent, but the former shares some common characteristics with Tsakonian.
Yevanic יעואניקה, Γεβανικά is an almost extinct language of Romaniote Jews. The language was already in decline for centuries until most of its speakers were killed in the Holocaust. Afterward, the language was mostly kept by remaining Romaniote emigrants to Israel, where it was displaced by modern Hebrew.
Tsakonian Τσακωνικά is spoken in its full form today only in a small number of villages around the town of Leonidio in the region of Arcadia in the Southern Peloponnese, and partially spoken further afield in the area. Tsakonian evolved directly from Laconian ancient Spartan and therefore descends from Doric Greek.
It has limited input from Hellenistic Koine and is significantly different from and not mutually intelligible with other Greek varieties such as Demotic Greek and Pontic Greek. Some linguists consider it a separate language because of this.