Mykonos; Ελληνική σημαία
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About the author: Eleni Demetriou speaks fluent Greek, as well as some Spanish and Portuguese. A graduate of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Management, as well as Seton Hall University, where she received an MBA in Finance, Ms. Demetriou utilizes her language skills to support a career in international finance.
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Historians have traced the origins of the Greek language to approximately the end of the third millennium BCE, known as the Proto-Greek period. The language was not written at the time, so no known records exist; rather, historians believe this was around the time that Greek speakers first came to Greece. The first written records of the language appeared around the 14th century BCE in Mycenaean texts. In these earliest writings, the Mycenaean civilization used written language called Linear B, and the symbols matched syllables, entire words, or concepts rather than single phonic sounds.
The classical period, occurring around the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, saw the emergence of an array of dialects, including Attic and Ionic, which people spoke in and around Athens. During this time, Alexander the Great brought the Attic-Ionic form of Greek as the language of commerce to the Balkan region of Eastern Europe. As Eastern Europeans adopted Attic-Ionic Greek for business and commerce, their dialects transformed it into Hellenistic Greek. That form of the language remained in use throughout the Roman Empire until the Middle Ages, when Greek was used in the Byzantine Empire as the language of government.
Modern Greek came into its true form in the 1830s when Greece won its freedom from Turkish control. The current form of the language emerged from the dialects spoken at the centers of the new, free Greece: the regions of Athens and Peloponnese.
