Modern Greek

Modern Greek
Νέα Ελληνικά
Pronunciation	[ˈne.a eliniˈka]
Native to	Greece, Cyprus, Albania (North Epirus), Armenia, Bulgaria, Egypt (Alexandria), Italy (Salento, Calabria), Romania, Turkey, Ukraine (Mariupol), plus diaspora
Native speakers	12 million (2007)
Language family	Indo-European Hellenic Greek Attic–Ionic Modern Greek
Early forms	Proto-Greek Ancient Greek Koine Greek Medieval Greek Modern Greek
Standard forms	Standard Modern Greek
Dialects	Italiot Greek (Calabrian and Griko) Pontic (including Mariupolitan) Cappadocian Tsakonian Yevanic Maniot Himariote Cypriot Cretan Demotic (base for the St. Mod. Greek) Katharevousa (artificial, base for the St. Mod. Greek) other
Writing system	Greek alphabet Greek Braille
Language codes
ISO 639-1	el
ISO 639-2	(B)  (T)
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	mode1248
Linguasphere	part of 56-AAA-a
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Modern Greek (Νέα Ελληνικά [ˈnea eliniˈka] or Νεοελληνική Γλώσσα [neoeliniˈci ˈɣlosa] "Neo-Hellenic", historically and colloquially also known as Ρωμαίικα "Romaic" or "Roman", and Γραικικά "Greek") refers to the dialects and varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era.

The end of the Medieval Greek period and the beginning of Modern Greek is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features of the language arose centuries earlier, between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries AD.

During most of the period, the language existed in a situation of diglossia, with regional spoken dialects existing side by side with learned, more archaic written forms, as with the demotic and learned varieties (Dimotiki and Katharevousa) that co-existed throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Varieties of Modern Greek include:

Strictly speaking, Demotic (Δημοτική) refers to all popular varieties of Modern Greek that followed a common evolutionary path from Koine and have retained a high degree of mutual intelligibility to the present. As shown in Ptochoprodromic and Acritic poems, Demotic Greek was the vernacular already before the 11th century and called the "Roman" language of the Byzantine Greeks, notably in peninsular Greece, the Greek islands, coastal Asia Minor, Constantinople, and Cyprus.

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