Greek language explained to kids

The Greek language is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken by about 13 million people in Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Italy, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek is an official language of the European Union and the United Nations. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since the Bronze Age. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages. Classical Greek, the language of Homer and other early writers, is a uniform and literary dialect that was once used throughout the Greek-speaking world. Koine Greek, the language of the Hellenistic period, is the direct ancestor of Modern Greek. Greek is written in the Greek alphabet, which has been used since the 8th century BC. The alphabet was devised from the Phoenician alphabet. Many of the letters have distinct names and sound values that differ from those of English. Greek is a synthetic, or inflected, language. This means that most words are not written as they are spoken, but are altered depending on their role in a sentence. For example, the word for "dog" is written as "dogs" when it is the subject of a sentence, but as "dog's" when it is the Possessive case. Greek has five major dialects: Doric, Aeolic, Arcadic, Ionic, and Attic. The dialects can be divided into two groups: East Greek, which includes Ionic and Attic, and West Greek, which includes Doric, Aeolic, and Arcadic. Doric is the dialect of Homer and the Iliad, and is spoken in the southern Peloponnese, Sicily, and Euboea. Aeolic is spoken in Boeotia, Thessaly, Lesbos, and parts of Asia Minor. Arcadic is spoken in Arcadia, in the central Peloponnese. Ionic is spoken in Attica, Euboea, the Cyclades, and parts of Asia Minor. Attic is the dialect of Plato and Aristotle, and is the basis for Modern Greek.