Ancient Macedonian
Sign in to saveAlso known as Ancient Macedonian language, Greek-Macedonian, Greek Macedonian, xmk
ancient Greek language spoken in Macedonia, northern ancient Greece
Key facts
- Region
- Macedon
- Ethnicity
- Ancient Macedonians
- Era
- 1st millennium BC
- Language family
- Indo-European Hellenic Ancient Greek ? Doric ? Northwest Greek ? Ancient Macedonian
- Early form
- Proto-Greek
- Iso 639 3
- xmk
- Glottolog
- anci1249
via Wikipedia infobox
~34 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Ancient Macedonian was either an ancient Greek dialect—part of Northwest or Aeolic Greek—or a Hellenic language spoken by the ancient Macedonians during the 1st millennium BC. Spoken originally in the kingdom of Macedon, it gradually fell out of use during the 4th century BC, marginalized by the Macedonian aristocracy's use of Attic Greek, the dialect that became the basis of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Hellenistic period. It became extinct during either the Hellenistic or Roman imperial period, and was entirely replaced by Koine Greek.
While the bulk of surviving public and private inscriptions found in ancient Macedonia were written in Attic Greek (and later in Koine Greek), fragmentary documentation of a vernacular local Macedonian variety comes from onomastic evidence, ancient glossaries, and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the curse tablets from Pella and Pydna.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Ancient Macedonian” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.