Greek

Which scripts wrote Greek before the alphabet

Linear B, a syllabary attested from the late 15th century BC, was the first, deciphered in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick on the research of Alice Kober, and its language, Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek. In Cyprus a separate Cypriot syllabary was used from the 11th century BC until the late Classical period.

The alphabet came from the Phoenician one around the 9th century BC, with some letters turned into vowels. Today's form is the late Ionic variant, adopted for Attic in 403 BC, with 24 letters; lower case was a medieval invention of scribes writing with ink and quill.

How the language question was settled

Modern Greece inherited two competing forms. Dimotiki was the vernacular. Katharevousa, meaning purified, was an early 19th-century compromise with Ancient Greek used for literature and official business in the new state. Translations of the Gospels and of the Oresteia into the vernacular set off riots, and people died. In 1976 Dimotiki, having absorbed features of Katharevousa, was declared the official language of Greece; the result is Standard Modern Greek.

A writing reform in 1982 dropped most of the old diacritics. Modern Greek now uses the monotonic system, with only the acute accent and the diaeresis, while the polytonic system survives for Ancient Greek.

Where else Greek has official standing

Greek is official in Akrotiri and Dhekelia, beside English. It is used co-officially in some municipalities of the Gjirokastër and Sarandë districts of Albania and is an official minority language in Apulia and Calabria in Italy, where Greek-speaking communities write it in Latin script. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne protects it as a minority language in Turkey.