Although it is officially considered a dialect, Tsakonian is a divergent variety of Greek frequently classified as a separate language, as it is not intelligible to speakers of standard Modern Greek.

Today, it is spoken in a small mountainous area in the interior of the eastern coast of the Peloponnesian peninsula, in the Argolic Gulf, around the towns of Leonidio and Tyros (although it used to extend much further south). It is a unique language among Greek varieties.

The reason is that it is believed not to derive from the Ancient Koine of Attic and Ionic (from which all other Greek languages, including Modern Greek, originate) but from Doric or a late and ancient variety of Koine influenced by Doric that was once spoken in a wider area of the Peloponnesus, including Laconia. That is to say, from the language spoken by the Spartans.

Tsakonian
In blue, the small Tsakonian-speaking area on a map from 1890. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Thus, it is considered the only living descendant of the Doric language (although specialists still debate whether to include the Maniot dialect here). In any case, only a few hundred speakers of Tsakonian remain, and today it is considered endangered.

Tsakonian vocabulary is, according to experts, recognizably Doric, although over the years it has borrowed extensively from Modern Greek and even Turkish.

Traditionally, the standard Greek alphabet is used to write it, supplemented with digraphs and symbols to represent sounds not found in Demotic Greek.

“Our language is Tsakonian. Ask people to speak it with you”. A bilingual (Tsakonian–Modern Greek) sign from Leonidio or Tyros (Greece). Credit: Мико / Wikimedia Commons

The region where it is spoken is called Tsakonia, although it is not a political entity within the Greek state. In his Brief Grammar of the Tsakonian Dialect published in 1951, Professor Thanasis Costakis defined Tsakonia as the area extending from the town of Agios Andreas in Kynouria southward to Leonidio and Tyros and inland to Kastanitsa and Sitaina. However, he stated that in earlier times, the Tsakonian-speaking area extended as far as Cape Malea in eastern Laconia.

The main town of Tsakonia during Ottoman times was Prastos, which enjoyed a special trade privilege granted by the authorities in Constantinople.

Prastos was burned by Ibrahim Pasha during the Greek War of Independence and subsequently abandoned, with its residents fleeing to the area around Leonidio and Tyros and other places in the Argolic Gulf—the region where Tsakonian speakers are found today.

As for the term Tsakonian, it first appears in the writings of Byzantine chroniclers, who derive the ethnonym from a corruption of Lakonas (Laconian–Lacedaemonian, i.e., Spartan), a reference to the Doric roots of the Tsakonian language and the relatively late conversion of its people to Christianity and the practice of traditional Hellenic customs.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on September 23, 2019: El Tsakonio es el único lenguaje griego actual que proviene del que hablaban los espartanos

SOURCES

Tsakonian Dialect

Endangered Languages Project

Projet Homere

Wikipedia, Idioma tsakonio

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