1 MODERN GREEK by Brian D. Joseph & Georgios Tserdanelis The Ohio State University [Prepared for the volume Variationstypologie. Ein sprachtypologisches Handbuch zu den europäischen Sprachen in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. by Thorsten Roelcke] 0. Introduction Modern Greek, called eliniká by its some 13,000,000 speakers, is the descendant of Ancient Greek, and thus is part of the Greek or Hellenic branch of Indo-European. Greek speakers are located mostly in the nation of Greece itself, with some 10,000,000 living there, but large numbers are to be found also in Cyprus (c. 500,000) and parts of the diaspora (e.g. 1,000,000 in Australia, chiefly in Melbourne). Historically, Greek speakers have settled all over the eastern Mediterranean, in Southern Italy, along the Black Sea coasts, in Egypt, the Levant, Cyprus, and much of Asia Minor. This geographical spread continued throughout the Hellenistic period and on through the Byzantine and Medieval periods, and is valid to some extent even into the Modern era, though most of the Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) were removed to Greece (and many Greek-speaking Moslems from Greece to Turkey) after the population exchanges of the early 1920s in the wake of Greece’s unsuccessful expansionist forays. Within Greece, the greatest concentration of speakers, some 4,000,000 or more, lives in the greater Athens area alone, most of them speakers — and shapers — of the current standard language.