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( Greek language)
Greek (e??????? ???ssa IPA&_160;[e?lini'k?i '?lo?sa] or simply e??????? IPA&_160;[e?lini'ka] — "Hellenic") is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people, mainly in Greece and Cyprus but also by minority and emigrant communities in numerous other countries. Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since the 9th century BC in Greece (before that, in Linear B during the 15th-13th centuries BC), and the 4th century BC in Cyprus (before that in Cypriot syllabary). Greek literature has a continuous history of nearly three thousand years. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan Peninsula since the 2nd millennium BC. The earliest written evidence is found in the Linear B tablets in the "Room of the Chariot Tablets", a LMII-context (c. 1400 BC) region of Knossos, in Crete, making Greek one of the world's oldest recorded living languages. Among its fellow Indo-European languages, Greek's date of earliest attestation is matched only by Vedic Sanskrit and the extinct Anatolian languages. The later Greek alphabet is unrelated to Linear B, and is derived from the Phoenician alphabet (abjad); with minor modifications, it is still used today. Greek is conventionally divided into the following periods
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