13 Facts About Tsakonian language

Tsakonian language is a Greek dialect which is both highly divergent from other spoken varieties of Modern Greek and, from a philological standpoint, linguistically classified separately from them.

Tsakonian language descends from the Doric Greek dialect spoken in Laconia by the ancient Spartans, and it is the only living descendant of Doric Greek.

Tsakonian language is found today in a group of mountain towns and villages slightly inland from the Argolic Gulf, although it was once spoken farther to the south and west as well as on the coasts of Laconia.

The rise of mass education and improved travel beginning after the Greek War of Independence meant that fluent Tsakonian language speakers were no longer as isolated from the rest of Greece.

Efforts to revive the Tsakonian language by teaching it in local schools do not seem to have had much success.

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Propontis Tsakonian appears to have died out around 1970, although it had already stopped being the primary language of its community after 1914 when they were internally exiled with other Greeks in the region due to the outbreak of World War I Propontis Tsakonian was overall grammatically more conservative, but it was influenced by the nearby Thracian dialects of Greek which were much closer to Standard Modern Greek.

The Northern villages were much more exposed to the rest of Greek society, and as a result, according to linguist Nick Nicholas, Northern Tsakonian language experienced much heavier Standard Greek lexical and phonological influence, before it began to die out much faster than Southern Tsakonian language.

Noun morphology is broadly similar to Standard Modern Greek, although Tsakonian language tends to drop the nominative, final -? from masculine nouns, thus Tsakonian language ? ts??fta for Standard o t??ft??.

Tsakonian language avoids clusters, and reduces them to aspirated or prenasalised stops and affricates:.

Tsakonian language has undergone considerable morphological changes: there is minimal case inflection.

Present and imperfect indicative in Tsakonian language are formed with participles, like English but unlike the rest of Greek: Tsakonian language e?e? a??, eµa a?? "I am saying, I was saying" ˜ Greek e?µ? ?a???, ?µ?? ?a???.

Tsakonian language has preserved the original inflection of the aorist indicative.

Traditionally, Tsakonian language used the standard Greek alphabet, along with digraphs to represent certain sounds that either do not occur in Demotic Greek, or that do not commonly occur in combination with the same sounds as they do in Tsakonian language.