dialects

1. Greek. (For the origins of the Greek language see GREECE.)

1. The evidence of inscriptions (see EPIGRAPHY) and of literary texts shows that in classical times the Greek language existed in a number of dialects. The differences between them, small enough to allow each Greek city to understand the others, reflect the movement of Greek peoples in early times into and within Greece, and into the Aegean islands and the west coast of Asia Minor. The later predominance of the Attic dialect reflects the ascendancy of Athenian literature and culture generally (see 3 below).

The dialects of Greece in classical times fall into two broad divisions, West Greek and East Greek. These divisions subdivide further: West Greek comprises North-West Greek, spoken in Phocis, Locris, Elis, and Aetolia, and Doric, spoken throughout the Peloponnese and in the places colonized by Doric speakers, namely the southern group of Aegean islands, Crete, Rhodes, the south-west coast of Asia Minor, and many colonies in Sicily and Magna Graecia (south Italy). East Greek subdivides into Ionic, Aeolic, and Arcado-Cyprian. Ionic was spoken in Ionia (on the coast of Asia Minor), Euboea, and the islands in the Aegean colonized by Ionic speakers; its offshoot Attic was spoken in Attica and so by the Athenians. Aeolic was spoken in the island of Lesbos and in the neighbouring part of Asia Minor, and, with an admixture of West Greek, in Thessaly and Boeotia. The name Arcado-Cyprian (invented in modern times) expresses the close relationship between the dialect of Arcadia, in the centre of the Peloponnese, and that of Cyprus, far away in the eastern Mediterranean; for this dialect there are no literary texts. It has been suggested that the Arcadian and Cyprian dialects preserve some of the forms present in the Mycenaean Greek of earlier times because these parts were difficult of access and relatively isolated. The Dorians were a people of Greek stock who were thought to have arrived from the north-west c.1100 BC (see DORIAN INVASION), and who spoke a dialect not substantially different from that spoken in Greece before they arrived (see LINEAR B).

2. The dialect used by a Greek author is not necessarily that of his native speech nor that of the city in which he wrote. It is characteristic of the conservatism of Greek literature in its formal aspects that the dialect in which a literary genre originated remained the dialect of that genre in later times. Thus, because choral lyric poetry originated in a Doric-speaking region, all such poetry is written in a (literary) form of Doric, even when it is composed by a Boeotian (Pindar) or by an Ionic speaker (Bacchylides) or is found in Attic tragedy. All the dialects that appear in literature are modified so as to present their most conspicuous characteristics while avoiding the parochial or undignified; in the choral lyric of tragedy, for example, the Doric element became a conventional means of enriching and ennobling the diction.

The dialect of Homer's epic is an artificial amalgam of Ionic and Aeolic elements never spoken in conjunction at any one time in any one place. It was the product of a long tradition of epic poetry, the composition of which seems to have passed from an Aeolic- to an Ionic-speaking area. Hesiod, a Boeotian, wrote his poems in hexameters, the metre of Homeric epic, and so his dialect is virtually identical with Homer's, as was that of all later epic, e.g. the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Elegy (whose metre is hexameter followed by pentameter) was the invention of the Ionians, but since the hexameter was also the metre of Homeric epic, the dialect of elegy too is quite strongly epic, but with a larger admixture of Ionic forms. Tragedy and comedy at Athens were written in Attic, the local dialect and a branch of Ionic, except for the choral lyric parts, which were written in a form of Doric (see above). The lyric poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus was written in the native dialect of Lesbos, a branch of Aeolic. Anacreon wrote in his native Ionic, and Corinna in her local Boeotian. Iambic and trochaic poems were written in Ionic, although the Athenian Solon when writing in these metres used many forms taken from his native Attic. Pastoral poetry, a genre created by Theocritus, is mostly written in an artificial Doric made up of a variety of forms, some in general use, some purely local, others made up by false analogies; it also has a sprinkling of Aeolic and epic features. The modern sense of Doric meaning ‘rustic’ derives from the use of this dialect in pastoral poetry. Because prose literature first arose in Ionia, Ionic became the dialect of historical and scientific works. Even the Athenian historian Thucydides, writing mainly in Attic, avoided using peculiarly Attic forms so as not to depart too obviously from the appropriate dialect.

3. The koinē (‘common tongue’). The political unification of Greece which began under Philip II of Macedon (reigned 359–336 BC), and the absorption of large tracts of the East into a Greek empire, brought about the decline of the separate dialects and the rise of this new, uniform Greek. The Athenian Xenophon, who spent most of his life abroad, may be considered the first writer of the new koine. The basis of it was Attic, officially adopted by Philip II in preference to the semi-barbarous Macedonian dialect, and it spread, with the conquests of his son Alexander the Great, throughout the Greek empire. (The poets of the Hellenistic age could reproduce the old dialects only by studied effort.) The koine was the language in which the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament were written. In the first century AD there was an attempt to write Greek prose literature in the classical Attic dialect; of this revival Lucian is the best example. See SOPHISTIC, SECOND.

2. Italic. The Italic languages (a branch of Indo-European) consist of Latin, Oscan, and Umbrian, as well as the dialects of various mountain tribes of central Italy. When the Latin language was still confined to Rome and Latium, Oscan was the chief language of central Italy. See LATIN LANGUAGE.