Tsakonian language

Tsakonian
τσακώνικα
Native toGreece
RegionEastern Peloponnese, around Mount Parnon
EthnicityTsakonians
Native speakers
2,000–4,000 (2018)[1]
Indo-European
Dialects
  • Propontis †
  • Northern
  • Southern
  • Western? †
Language codes
ISO 639-3tsd
Glottologtsak1248
ELPTsakonian
Linguasphere56-AAA-b
Tsakonian is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
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Tsakonian or Tsaconian (also Tzakonian or Tsakonic, Greek: τσακώνικα and Tsakonian: τσακώνικα, α τσακώνικα γρούσσα) is a highly divergent modern variety of Greek, spoken in the Tsakonian region of the Peloponnese, Greece. Unlike all other extant varieties of Greek, Tsakonian derives from Doric Greek rather than from the Attic-Ionic branch.[2] Although it is conventionally treated as a dialect of Greek,[3][4][5] some compendia treat it as a separate language.[6] Tsakonian is critically endangered, with only a few hundred/thousand, mostly elderly, fluent speakers left.[6] Although Tsakonian and standard Modern Greek are related, they are not mutually intelligible.[7]

  1. ^ Campbell, Lyle; Bellew, Anna (2018). Cataloguing the World's Endangered Languages. Routledge. pp. 204–205. ISBN 9781317413899.
  2. ^ Linguist List
  3. ^ Browning, Robert (1983). Medieval and modern Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 124.
  4. ^ Horrocks, Geoffrey (2010). Greek: A history of the language and its speakers (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. p. 382.
  5. ^ Joseph, Brian D.; Terdanelis, Georgios (2003). "Modern Greek". In Roelcke, Thorsten (ed.). Variation typology: a typological handbook of European languages. Berlin: de Gruyter. pp. 823–836. Joseph, Brian D. (2012). "Lexical diffusion and the regular transmission of language chang in its sociohistorical context". In Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel; Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo (eds.). Handbook of historical sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 411.
  6. ^ a b Moseley, Christopher (2007). Encyclopedia of the world's endangered languages. New York: Routledge. s.v. "Tsakonian".
  7. ^ Encyclopedia of World Cultures: Europe (Central, Western, and Southeastern Europe). G.K. Hall. 1991. p. 269. ISBN 978-0-8161-1808-3. Tsakonian is a dialect of Greek and is related to, though not mutually intelligible with, modern Greek.