Varieties of Modern Greek - Spoken Dialects

Spoken Dialects

Spoken modern vernacular Greek can be divided into various geographical dialects. There are a small number of highly divergent, outlying varieties spoken by relatively isolated communities, and a broader range of mainstream dialects less divergent from each other and from Standard Modern Greek, which cover most of the linguistic area of present-day Greece and Cyprus. Native Greek scholarship traditionally distinguishes between "dialects" proper (διάλεκτος), i.e. strongly marked, distinctive varieties, and mere "idioms" (ιδίωμα), less markedly distinguished sub-varieties of a language. In this sense, the term "dialect" is often reserved to only the main outlying forms listed in the next section (Tsakonian, Griko, Pontic, and Cappadocian), whereas the bulk of the mainstream spoken varieties of present-day Greece are classified as "idioms". However, most English-speaking linguists tend to refer to them as "dialects", emphasising degrees of variation only when necessary. The geographical dialects of Greek are divided into two main groups, Northern and Southern:

Examples of Northern dialects are Rumelian, Epirote, Thessalian, Macedonian, Thracian.

The Southern category is divided into groups that include variety groups from:

1. Megara, Aegina, Athens, Kymi (Old Athenian) and Mani Peninsula (Maniot)
2. Peloponnese (except Mani), Cyclades and Crete, Ionian Islands, Northern Epirus, Smyrna and Constantinople
3. Dodecanese and Cyprus.
4. Part of Southern Albania (known as Northern Epirus among Greeks).
5. Asia Minor (over 1.000.000 Greeks were living throughout Anatolia -especially in western Anatolia- before the population exchange with Turkey)