The two combatants were Katharevousa (Καθαρεύουσα), the “purified” tongue, and Demotic (Δημοτική), the “language of the people.” Their conflict reveals a fascinating story of class division, nationalism, and the profound power of language to shape a country’s destiny.

A New Nation’s Ancient Ambitions

To understand the war, we must go back to the early 19th century. After nearly 400 years under Ottoman rule, Greece fought a bloody war of independence and became a sovereign state in 1830. A monumental question immediately arose: Now that we are free, who are we?

The new nation’s intellectuals and politicians looked to the past for answers. They wanted to shed the cultural layers of Ottoman, Venetian, and Slavic influence and reconnect with the “untainted” glory of Ancient Greece. The spoken language of the time, Demotic, was seen as a problem. It was a vibrant, living language, but it was also riddled with Turkish, Italian, and Slavic loanwords. Its grammar had simplified over the centuries. To the elite, it sounded “vulgar” and “corrupted,” unworthy of the descendants of Plato and Pericles.

The solution came from a prominent scholar named Adamantios Korais. He proposed a “middle way”: a cleansed, archaizing language that would be purged of foreign influence and grammatically “corrected” to be closer to Ancient Greek. This constructed language was Katharevousa. It was adopted as the official language of the state, used in government, law, newspapers, and higher education. It was meant to be a bridge to a glorious past and a symbol of national sophistication.

The Voice of the People Rises

There was just one major problem: almost nobody actually spoke Katharevousa. While the elites in Athens wrote and debated in their purified tongue, the farmers, fishermen, and merchants across the country continued to live, love, and curse in Demotic Greek.

Demotic was the organic evolution of the language, the true mother tongue of the Greek people. Proponents of Demotic, known as demoticists, argued that to deny the spoken language was to deny the people themselves. The great poet Dionysios Solomos, who wrote the Greek national anthem, famously declared, “I have no other thing in my mind but freedom and language.” For him and many others, the true, free voice of Greece was Demotic.

This created a state of extreme diglossia: a society where two distinct varieties of a language are used in different social contexts. You might use Demotic at home with your family but have to navigate the complex, artificial grammar of Katharevousa to read a newspaper or deal with the government. This wasn’t just a linguistic curiosity; it became a profound social and political schism.

• Class: Katharevousa became the language of the educated, urban elite. Demotic was the language of the rural, working, and lower classes. Language became an immediate and powerful class marker.
• Politics: The issue became intensely politicized. Conservatives, royalists, and later, right-wing dictatorships championed Katharevousa as a pillar of tradition and order. Liberals, socialists, and progressives rallied behind Demotic as the language of democracy and the common person.

When Words Led to Bloodshed

The tension wasn’t confined to academic halls and political salons. It exploded into violence on several occasions, proving just how deeply the issue cut into the national psyche.

The Evangelika (Gospel Riots) of 1901

When the New Testament, originally written in a form of post-classical Greek called Koine, was translated into modern Demotic for a newspaper serialization, it caused an uproar. Conservative academics and theological students saw this as a profanation—a “vulgarization” of the sacred text. They staged massive protests in Athens, chanting that the translation was a betrayal of the nation and faith. The riots grew so violent that they led to the fall of the government and left eight people dead.

The Oresteia Riots of 1903

Two years later, history repeated itself. A production of Aeschylus’s ancient trilogy, the Oresteia, was staged at the Royal Theatre in a Demotic translation. Once again, purists were outraged. They saw the use of the “common” tongue to render a classical masterpiece as an unforgivable insult to their cultural heritage. Riots erupted, leading to clashes with the police and at least one death.

The Long Road to Resolution

For decades, the battle raged on. Each side had its poets, its authors, and its politicians. Writing in Demotic was a political act. Insisting on Katharevousa was a statement of class and ideology.

The tide began to turn decisively in the 20th century. The “Generation of the 1930s,” a group of writers that included future Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, embraced Demotic in their work, giving it immense literary prestige. Their powerful, modern poetry proved that the people’s language was more than capable of expressing the most profound artistic and intellectual ideas.

The final blow to Katharevousa came with the fall of the military junta in 1974. The dictatorship had been a fierce supporter of the purist language, linking it inextricably with authoritarianism and oppression in the public mind. When democracy was restored, one of the first acts of the new government was to finally resolve the language question.

In 1976, two years after the fall of the junta, a law was passed making Demotic Greek the official language of the state and education. The language war was, officially, over.

The Echoes of a War of Words

Today, the language of Greece is what is known as Standard Modern Greek, which is based firmly on Demotic but has absorbed many words and stylistic elements from the Katharevousa tradition. The old, rigid Katharevousa is no longer used, though its ghost lingers in legal and ecclesiastical language, and in certain formal expressions that have entered the common vocabulary.

The Greek Language War is a stark and powerful reminder that language is never just a set of rules and words. It is the repository of a culture’s history, the expression of its identity, and a battleground for its future. It shows how the struggle over a verb, a noun, or a simple turn of phrase can reflect a nation’s deepest anxieties about who it is and who it wants to be.