Imagine returning home after a twenty-year voyage, much like Ulysses (Odysseus) in Homer’s epic, only to find that your family speaks two entirely different versions of your native tongue. One is the language of the heart, used for love, anger, and grocery shopping. The other is a formal, rigid construct used for law, government, and education—a language that signifies status but lacks a pulse.

For nearly two centuries, this was the linguistic reality of modern Greece. It wasn’t just a matter of dialects or accents; it was a state of diglossia. Greece was torn between two official identities: the “high” variety known as Katharevousa (“The Purified”) and the “low” variety known as Demotic (“The People’s Language”).

The struggle between these two forms—known as the “Language Question” (To Glossiko Zitima)—sparked riots, toppled governments, and defined the Greek identity crisis from the War of Independence until the late 20th century. For linguistics enthusiasts and language learners, the story of Greek diglossia is a fascinating case study in how politics can weaponize grammar and vocabulary.

The Origins: A Nation in Search of a Voice

To understand the conflict, we must look back to the early 19th century. After 400 years of Ottoman rule, Greece began its fight for independence in 1821. The revolutionaries weren’t just fighting for land; they were fighting to reclaim their heritage as the descendants of Socrates, Plato, and Pericles.

However, there was a glaring problem. The Greek spoken by the average person in the 1800s had evolved significantly from the Attic Greek of the Golden Age. It had simplified grammar and adopted loanwords from Turkish, Italian, and Slavic languages. To the intellectual elite and the European Philhellenes supporting the revolution, this spoken language felt “corrupted.”

The dilemma was sharp: Should the new state adopt the spoken language of the illiterate masses? Or should it try to resurrect the dead language of the ancients?

The Compromise: The Birth of Katharevousa

Enter Adamantios Korais, a prominent scholar of the Greek Enlightenment. Korais believed that Ancient Greek was too difficult for the modern population, but the spoken Demotic was too “vulgar” for a modern state. He proposed a “Middle Way.”

He engineered Katharevousa. It was a constructed semi-artificial language. Ideally, it used the vocabulary and morphology (word forms) of Ancient Greek but adhered to a more modern syntax. The goal was to “cleanse” the language of foreign loanwords and return it to its classical roots. For example, the Turkish loanword for “fish” was discarded in favor of the ancient root.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Katharevousa became the language of the state. If you went to court, read a newspaper, or attended high school, you had to use Katharevousa. But when you went home to eat dinner, you spoke Demotic.

Linguistic Schizophrenia: High vs. Low

For a linguistics student, the differences between Katharevousa and Demotic provide a perfect example of H (High) and L (Low) language varieties. The differences were not subtle; they existed in the most basic vocabulary.

• Bread: Psomi (Demotic) vs. Artos (Katharevousa).
• Water: Nero (Demotic) vs. Hydor (Katharevousa).
• Fish: Psari (Demotic) vs. Ichthys (Katharevousa).
• House: Spiti (Demotic) vs. Oikos (Katharevousa).

Grammatically, the divide was even deeper. Katharevousa retained the ancient Dative case, complex participles, and the letter “n” at the end of accusative nouns, all of which had naturally dropped out of spoken Greek centuries prior.

Imagine a scenario in English where you say “I am going to the house” to your friends, but in a courtroom, you are legally required to say, “I wend toward the domicile.” Now imagine that using the former in a formal setting implies you are uneducated, while using the latter in the street makes you sound pompous or ridiculous. This was the Greek reality.

Blood on the Streets: The Gospel Riots

It is difficult for modern English speakers, whose language evolves somewhat organically, to understand how violent this linguistic struggle became. In Greece, language was a matter of national soul and religious sanctity.

The most shocking example occurred in 1901, known as the “Gospel Riots” (Evangeliaka). Queen Olga of Greece, shocked that the wounded soldiers she visited couldn’t understand the Bible (which was read in the ancient Koine Greek of the New Testament), commissioned a translation of the Gospels into simple Demotic Greek.

When the translation was serialized in a newspaper, all hell broke loose. University students, incited by conservative professors who viewed Demotic as a desecration of the Holy Word, took to the streets of Athens. The riots lasted for days. By the end, eight people were dead and over sixty were wounded. The government fell, and the translation was banned.

People literally died over the question of which words should be used to say “In the beginning was the Word.”

The Resolution: Demotic Wins

The battle raged for decades. The “Generation of the ’30s”, a group of poets and writers (including Noble Prize winners Seferis and Elytis), began writing exclusively in Demotic, proving it was capable of high art and complex thought.

However, politics kept interfering. During the military dictatorship (The Junta) of 1967–1974, Katharevousa was strictly enforced as a tool of authoritarianism and fervent nationalism. Speaking Demotic in schools was forbidden. When the dictatorship collapsed in 1974, Katharevousa collapsed with it.

In 1976, Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis passed a historic reform establishing Demotic as the sole official language of the Greek state. Linguistic harmony was finally achieved. The “Language Question” was officially closed.

The Modern Legacy: A Linguistic Merging

So, did Katharevousa disappear? Not entirely. Like a ghost in the machine, it haunts Modern Greek (now called Standard Modern Greek).

While the grammar of today is Demotic, the vocabulary has been permanently enriched by Katharevousa. Modern Greek is a fusion. Speakers might use a Demotic grammar structure but insert a Katharevousa phrase for emphasis or irony. For example, the police are still referred to as Astynomia (City-Law, a formal construct) rather than a slang term.

Furthermore, in legal, crushed, and ecclesiastical contexts, phrases from the “High” variety persist. A Greek news anchor today sounds significantly different from a Greek teenager on TikTok—not just in slang, but in the grammatical structures they choose to employ.

Conclusion: Finding Ithaca

The story of Greek diglossia is a powerful reminder that language is never just a tool for communication; it is a flag, a weapon, and history book. The effort to force a nation to speak an “idealized” language failed because languages are living organisms that belong to the people who speak them, not the scholars who codify them.

Greece eventually found its Ithaca. It didn’t return to the ancient past, nor did it succumb entirely to the “vulgar” simplifications feared by the elites. It found a home in Standard Modern Greek—a language that carries the scars of its history but is vibrant, unified, and unmistakably alive.