12 Facts About Doric Greek

Doric Greek was spoken in a vast area, that included northern Greece, most of the Peloponnese (Achaea, Elis, Messenia, Laconia, Argolid, Aegina, Corinth, and Megara), the southern Aegean (Kythira, Milos, Thera, Crete, Karpathos, and Rhodes), as well as the colonies of some of the aforementioned regions, in Cyrene, Magna Graecia, the Black Sea, the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea.

The only living descendant of Doric Greek is the Tsakonian language which is still spoken in Greece today; though critically endangered, with only a few hundred – mostly elderly – fluent speakers left.

The prevalent theme of most views listed there is that Doric is a subgroup of West Greek.

The geographic distinction is only verbal and ostensibly is misnamed: all of Doric was spoken south of "Southern Greek" or "Southeastern Greek.

Thus West Doric Greek is the most accurate name for the classical dialects.

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Tsakonian, a descendant of Laconian Doric Greek, is still spoken on the southern Argolid coast of the Peloponnese, in the modern prefectures of Arcadia and Laconia.

Northwest Doric group is closely related to Doric proper, while sometimes there is no distinction between Doric and the Northwest Doric.

The Northwest Doric Greek dialects differ from the main Doric Greek Group dialects in the below features:.

Johannes Engels has pointed to the Pella curse tablet, written in Doric Greek: "This has been judged to be the most important ancient testimony to substantiate that Macedonian was a north-western Greek and mainly a Doric dialect".

Miltiades Hatzopoulos has suggested that the Macedonian dialect of the 4th century BC, as attested in the Pella curse tablet, was a sort of Macedonian 'koine' resulting from the encounter of the idiom of the 'Aeolic'-speaking populations around Mount Olympus and the Pierian Mountains with the Northwest Doric Greek-speaking Argead Macedonians hailing from Argos Orestikon, who founded the kingdom of Lower Macedonia.

Northwest Doric Greek koine refers to a supraregional North-West common variety that emerged in the third and second centuries BC, and was used in the official texts of the Aetolian League.

The Northwest Doric Greek koine was thus both a linguistic and a political rival of the Attic-Ionic koine.