Modern Greek

Language Section Number: 362

How to register for Critical Languages Classes

Modern Greek refers to the dialects and varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The end of the Medieval Greek period and the beginning of Modern Greek is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features of the language arose centuries earlier, between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries AD. 12 million people claim Modern Greek to be their native language.

Modern Greek is written in the Greek alphabet, which has 24 letters, each with a capital and lowercase (small) form. The letter sigma additionally has a special final form. There are two diacritical symbols, the acute accent which indicates stress and the diaeresis marking a vowel letter as not being part of a digraph. Greek has a mixed historical and phonemic orthography, where historical spellings are used if their pronunciation matches modern usage. The correspondence between consonant phonemes and graphemes is largely unique, but several of the vowels can be spelled in multiple ways.

The Hellenic Cultural Foundation of Tucson offers scholarships for full-time University of Arizona students who are studying Modern Greek. There is an annual deadline for the application every spring: https://hcf.arizona.edu/scholarships/. Scholarship awards can be used for the program fee for Modern Greek classes through the Critical Languages Program. In addition, the Hellenic Cultural Foundation awards the annual Ariana Mercedes Economou Award for Excellence in Modern Greek Language to a student in the Modern Greek classes.

For students enrolled in Modern Greek for the first time at the UArizona CLP there are HCF Critical Language Study Scholarships available through the Hellenic Cultural Foundation to reimburse students for the Critical Language Program fee. Students wishing to apply for these scholarships should email hcfscholarships@gmail.com with your name, address, major/graduate program, a short discussion of why you chose to study Modern Greek and how the scholarship is important to you financially. The deadline is October 1 each year. Funds will be sent to the students after the withdrawal period for the semester has ended.

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