Since last April, a noble effort had begun for the UN member-states to recognise an International Day for the Greek Language. This effort was undertaken by a group of scientists, mainly linguists and intellectuals, and a long struggle began to submit the relevant demarche to the UN and its members, highlighting and justifying the reasons why this honorary distinction should be bestowed to our small Great Greek Language.
Scientists, linguists and philologists, intellectuals and artists took part in this struggle and serious consultations followed in Paris, where UNESCO is based, and our Greek Ambassador there, Georgios Koumoutsakos, a political scientist, former member of Parliament, intellectual and diplomat.
The presentations of Prof. G. Babiniotis and Prof. Christos Clairis and others formed the basis of a treatise that highlighted the reasons why our language, Greek, should emerge as a language with Global Recognition that should be honored on a specific Day by all countries.
Last year I had the opportunity to present from this column of The Greek Herald the reasons why the Greek language is a unique case of a world heritage language that has remained as a continuously spoken language in the Western world for 3500 years. Since then, there have been many consultations, cooperation meetings, contacts initiated by Mr. Koumoutsakos with Ambassadors of European, Asian, African and American countries.
This experienced diplomat and politician with sensitive interventions and suggestions, for months, has been trying to bring the issue of recognition to the UN by May 2025. The assessments so far indicate optimism and I believe that all relevant diplomats will have been properly prepared to vote in favour of Greece’s proposal, which will be supported constructively by dozens of countries that appreciate the contribution of the Greek language to the global linguistic and scientific culture. Besides, as I have already pointed out in my previous articles, Greek may not be used as such by millions or even billions of people, but words, phonology, morphemes, and the syntax of Greek coexist and live together in dozens of languages and are used without their users being aware of their Greek origin.
Historical, intellectual, cultural, academic, ethnological, socio-economic and emotional reasons determine and weave the importance of the Greek language as a means of communication, teaching and expression, in at least two European countries (Greece and Cyprus) as well as in the “other Greece”, i.e. the global Greek Diaspora.
A special reference to the “other Greece” is attempted here, because more than five million Greeks and people who maintain ties with Greece and Greeks use and promote Greek as a language of expression and a symbol of identity. It is noted that in many Chairs of Hellenic Studies in the Diaspora, Greek is used as the language of dissertations and postgraduate dissertations.
The main reasons that make the Greek language great with a universal dimension can be summarised as follows:
- Greek is the language of communication of 20 000 000 people related to Greece and Greeks.
- It is the only living language of Western civilization with a continuous living tradition of use of 4 000 years.
- Greek is the only modern variety of the Greek branch of the Indo-European language family.
- It is the source language of the phenomenon of linguistic transfer and the nurturing language of all Indo-European languages and the languages of the East. In English-speaking countries, sociologists of language and academics of comparative linguistics teach: “Learn Greek to improve your English…”.
- Greek is the language in which the monumental texts of Western civilization and the Scriptures of Christianity were written and transmitted.
- Greek is classified by linguists, despite the relatively small number of its users, as the “main world language”, due to its importance in matters of education and culture.
- Greek was spoken, used and composed by personalities who shaped world affairs, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Hippocrates, the Church Fathers, the great Hymnodons, natural scientists, mathematicians. The concepts of science were born through the words of the Greek language, leaving their traces in the so-called European civilization. These Greek words are the basis and the quintessence of the creation of languages: “Our words are children of many parents,” Seferis said, to make Greek, paraphrasing Elytis, “this great little language.” Greek is perhaps the only language in the world that has been universally engineered as a language of mechanism and genesis of newly constructed terms and new concepts.
- The most basic requirement for a person who wishes to know himself, to know the world and society around him and to know and use another language is to first learn and have a clear and sufficient knowledge of his mother tongue. Therefore, the knowledge and use of the Greek language is essentially for all of us the opus vitae.
The time has therefore come, and the conditions have matured for the formal establishment by UNESCO and the UN of the International Greek Language Day. Also, at the same time, the time has come to demand the recognition of Greek classical education as the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Every Greek should see himself as a contributor to the formation of pressure groups and collaborators in a common appeal to the UN.
Certainly, the Greek language does not have the demographic sizes of the colonial peoples, France, Spain, Britain, the multi-country spoken Arabic and Slavic, but it is the only small but universal language, thousands of words of which are inherent and incorporated into all the languages I mentioned above.
I would like to close this note on the Greek language with a quote from our great Nobel laureate poet, Odysseas Elytis, who taught creation and measure, which refers to the Divine Greek language, and reads as follows:
“I was given, dear friends, to write in a language spoken by only a few million people. Nevertheless, a language that has been spoken for two and a half thousand years without interruption and with few differences. This seemingly absurd dimension also corresponds to the material-spiritual entity of my country. Which is small in space and vast in time. And I mention it not at all to boast, but to show the difficulties that a poet faces when he uses for the most beloved things the same words that a Sappho or a Pindar, for example, used — without, however, having the impact that they had on the extent of civilized humanity at the time.
If language were merely a means of communication, there would be no problem. But it also happens to be a tool of magic and a carrier of moral values. Language has acquired over the centuries a certain ethos. And this ethos gives rise to obligations. Without forgetting that in the course of twenty-five centuries there was not one, I repeat not one, who did not write poetry in the Greek language. That is the great burden of tradition that this instrument carries. It is presented in relief by modern Greek poetry…”
*Professor Anastasios M. Tamis taught at Universities in Australia and abroad, was the creator and founding director of the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora and is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies (AIMS).
