The Proto-Greek language, also known as Proto-Hellenic, is the Indo-European language which was the last common ancestor of all varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean Greek, the subsequent ancient Greek dialects (i.e., Attic, Ionic, Aeolic, Doric proper, Arcadocypriot, Northwest Greek, ancient Macedonian—either a dialect or a closely related Hellenic language) and, ultimately, Koine, Byzantine and Modern Greek (along with its variants). Proto-Greek speakers entered Greece sometime during the European Bronze Age () with the diversification into a southern and a northern group beginning by approximately 1700BC.A comprehensive overview is in Oliver Dickinson's "The Coming of the Greeks and All That" (), J. T. Hooker's Mycenaean Greece (), and in Bryan Feuer's annotated bibliography (); for a different hypothesis excluding massive migrations and favoring an autochthonous scenario, see Colin Renfrew's "Problems in the General Correlation of Archaeological and Linguistic Strata in Prehistoric Greece: The Model of Autochthonous Origin" () in Bronze Age Migrations by R. A. Crossland and A. Birchall, eds. (1973).
Origins Context The evolution of Proto-Greek could be considered within the context of an early Paleo-Balkan sprachbund that makes it difficult to delineate exact boundaries between individual languages. The characteristically Greek representation of word-initial laryngeals by prothetic vowels is shared, for one, by the Armenian language, which also seems to share some other phonological and morphological peculiarities of Greek; this has led some linguists to propose a hypothetically closer relationship between Greek and Armenian, although evidence remains scant.
Estimates Estimates for the introduction of the Proto-Greek language into prehistoric Greece have changed over the course of the 20th century. Since the decipherment of Linear B, searches were made "for earlier breaks in the continuity of the material record that might represent the 'coming of the Greeks'". A Middle Bronze Age estimate, originally presented by C. Haley and J. Blegen in 1928, was altered to an estimate spanning the transition from Early Helladic II to Early Helladic III ( BCE). However, the latter estimate, accepted by the majority of scholars,; citing Strunk 85–98, Panagl 99–103, and Lindner 105–108 in . was criticized by John E. Coleman as being based on stratigraphic discontinuities at Lerna that other archaeological excavations in Greece demonstrated were the product of chronological gaps or separate deposit-sequencing instead of cultural changes.
Models In modern scholarship, different settlement models have been proposed regarding the development of Proto-Greek speakers in the Greek peninsula.
Paul Heggarty et al. (2023), advancing a mixed steppe-farmer model of Indo-European origins via Bayesian statistics, places Greek south of the Caucasus as an already diverged branch of Indo-European at around 7000 years before present ( BCE). Heggarty's hybrid model was critiqued by Kassian and Starostin (2025).
Panayiotis Filos (2014) states that the term Proto-Greek "does not necessarily refer to a fully homogeneous Indo-European language of the (late) Early/Middle Bronze periods (ca. 2200/2000-1700 BCE, but estimates vary)".. He argues that Proto-Greek developed "during a long, continuous linguistic process [...], as a migrating population of (soon-to-become) Greek speakers were en route to/on the outskirts of Greece, i.e., somewhere to the north(-west) of the Greek peninsula proper" and amalgamating with Pre-Greek speakers."
Radoslav Katičić (2012|1976) states that the lack of any traces of pre-Greek toponymy in Epirus and western Thessaly makes the region the most probable concentration site of Greek-speakers at around c. 1950 BC before their descent southwards.
Nancy Demand (2012) argues that speakers of what would become Proto-Greek migrated from their homeland (which could have been northeast of the Black Sea) throughout Europe and reached Greece in a date set around the transition of the Early Bronze Age to the Middle Bronze Age.
David Anthony (2010) argues that Proto-Greek emerged from the diversification of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), the last phase of which gave rise to the later language families having occurred in BCE;. its formation in Greece occurred during the beginning and end of the Early Helladic III period (~2200–2000 BC). Specifically, Pre-Proto-Greek, the Indo-European dialect from which Proto-Greek originated, emerged BCE in an area which bordered pre-Proto-Indo-Iranian to the east and pre-Proto-Armenian and pre-Proto-Phrygian to the west, at the eastern borders of southeastern Europe.
Asko Parpola and Christian Carpelan (2005) date the arrival of Proto-Greek speakers from the Eurasian steppe into the Greek peninsula to 2200 BCE..
John E. Coleman (2000) estimates that the entry of Proto-Greek speakers into the Greek peninsula occurred during the late 4th millennium BC (c. 3200BC) with pre-Greek spoken by the inhabitants of the Late Neolithic II period.
A. L. Katona (2000) places the beginning of the migration of the Proto-Greek speakers from Ukraine towards the south BCE. Their proposed route of migration passed through Romania and the eastern Balkans to the Evros river valley from where their main body moved west. As such, Katona, agreeing with M. V. Sakellariou, argues that the main body of Greek-speakers settled in a region that included southwestern Illyria, Epirus, northwestern Thessaly and western Macedonia."
Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjaceslav V. Ivanov (1995) date the separation of Greek from the Greek-Armenian-Aryan clade of Proto-Indo-European to around the 3rd millennium BCE. The Greek clade afterwards split into independently developed dialects (i.e., eastern: Arcado-Cyprian, Aeolic, Ionic; western: Doric) during the end of the 3rd or beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE.
Robert Drews (1994) dates the coming of chariot-riding Greeks into the Aegean in BC viewing earlier estimates as "deeply flawed". Drews' model, however, is rejected by modern Mycenologists on the grounds that it is both historically and linguistically inaccurate.
An older model by Bulgarian linguist Vladimir I. Georgiev (1981) placed Proto-Greek in northwestern Greece and adjacent areas (approximately up to Aulon river to the north including Parauaea, Tymphaia, Athamania, Dolopia, Amphilochia, and Acarnania as well as west and north Thessaly (Histiaeotis, Perrhaibia, Tripolis) and Pieria in Macedonia during the Late Neolithic period.. The boundaries are based on the high concentration of archaic Greek place-names in the region, in contrast to southern Greece which preserves many pre-Greek place-names. However, the dating of Proto-Greek in Bronze Age Greece is compatible with the inherited lexicon from the common Proto-Indo-European language which excludes any possibility of it being present in Neolithic Greece.
Diversification Ivo Hajnal dates the beginning of the diversification of Proto-Greek into the subsequent Greek dialects to a point not significantly earlier than 1700BC.. The conventional division of the Greek dialects prior to 1955 differentiated them between a West Greek (consisting of Doric and Northwest Greek) and an East Greek (consisting of Aeolic, Arcado-Cypriot, and Attic-Ionic) group. However, after the decipherment of the Linear B script, Walter Porzig and Ernst Risch argued for a division between a Northern (consisting of Doric, Northwest Greek, and Aeolic) and a Southern (consisting of Mycenaean, Arcado-Cypriot, and Attic-Ionic) group, which remains fundamental until today.
In Lucien van Beek's diversification scenario, South Greek-speaking tribes in spread to Boeotia, Attica, and the Peloponnese, while North Greek was spoken in Epirus, Thessaly, parts of Central Greece, and perhaps also Macedonia.: "In sum, the most likely scenario is as follows (see the tentative tree in ). In the first centuries of the second millennium, Proto-Greek was undifferentiated, although there was no doubt some variation, as well as affinities with other Balkan languages. Around 1700, South Greek-speaking tribes penetrated into Boeotia, Attica, and the Peloponnese, while North Greek was spoken roughly in Thessaly, parts of Central Greece, and further North and West (up to Epirus, and perhaps also Macedonia). During the early Mycenaean period, South Greek diverged by the assibilation of *ti, the simplification of word-internal *ts and *ss, and a number of morphological innovations.Scholars often date the immigration into the Peloponnese to the end of the third millennium, but I would prefer a later date coinciding with the beginning of Late Helladic, in the seventeenth century BCE (cf. Hajnal 2005). This would fit the linguistic data best, as reconstructible differences between South Greek and North Greek in the late Mycenaean period are relatively small."
For Christina Skelton, "[t]he state of the Greek dialects in the second millennium BCE is still controversial."
Phonology Phonemes Proto-Greek is reconstructed with the following phonemes:
Consonants Type Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Labiovelar Glottal Nasal m n ň Plosive p b pʰ t d tʰ t͏̌ d͏̌ k g kʰ kʷ gʷ kʷʰ Affricate ts dz Fricative s h Liquid l r l͏̌ ř Semivowel y w
Vowels Type Front Center Back Close i ī u ū Mid e ē ə o ō Open a ā Diphthongs are ai ei oi ui, au eu ou, āi ēi ōi, and possibly āu ēu ōu; all are allophonic with the corresponding sequences of vowel and semivowel. Exactly one vowel in each word bears a pitch accent (equivalent to the Attic Greek acute accent).
Proto-Greek changes The primary sound changes separating Proto-Greek from the Proto-Indo-European language include the following.
Consonants Delabialization of labiovelars next to , the "boukólos rule". This was a phonotactic restriction already in Proto-Indo-European, and continued to be productive in Proto-Greek. It ceased to be in effect when labiovelars disappeared from the language in post-Proto-Greek. Centumization: Merger of palatovelars and velars. Merging of sequences of velar + *w into the labiovelars, perhaps with compensatory lengthening of the consonant in one case: PIE *h₁éḱwos > PG *híkkʷos > Mycenaean , Attic híppos, Aeolic íkkos. Debuccalization of to in intervocalic and prevocalic positions (between two vowels, or if word-initial and followed by a vowel). Loss of prevocalic *s was not completed entirely, evidenced by sȳ́s ~ hȳ́s "pig" (from PIE *suh₁-), dasýs "dense" and dásos "dense growth, forest"; *som "with" is another example, contaminated with PIE *ḱom (Latin ; preserved in Greek , , ) to Mycenaean /ksun/, Homeric and Old Attic ksýn, later sýn. Furthermore, sélas "light in the sky, as in the aurora" and selḗnē/selā́nā "moon" may be more examples of the same if it derived from PIE *swel- "to burn" (possibly related to "sun", Ionic hēélios < *sāwélios). Strengthening of word-initial y- to dy- > dz- (note that Hy- > Vy- regularly due to vocalization of laryngeals). Two dentals next to each other become *st. Filos argues for a "probable" early loss of final non-nasal stop consonants: compare Latin quid and Sanskrit cid with Greek ti; however, Mycenaean texts are inconclusive in offering evidence on this matter, as the Linear B script did not explicitly mark final consonants. However, it appears that these stops were preserved word finally for unstressed words, reflected in ek "out of".. Final > . Initial > . Syllabic resonants *m̥, *n̥, *l̥ and *r̥ that are not followed by a laryngeal are resolved to vowels or combinations of a vowel and consonantal resonant. This resulted in an epenthetic vowel of undetermined quality (denoted here as *ə). This vowel then usually developed into a but also o in some cases. Thus: