The language spoken in Greece is Greek: Standard Modern Greek is the country’s only official language and is used by about 99% of its roughly 10.4 million people (Hellenic Statistical Authority estimate, 2025). Alongside it, Greece has regional Greek varieties such as Cretan and Pontic, the Doric-descended Tsakonian of the Peloponnese, and several non-Greek minority languages: Aromanian (Vlach) in the Pindus mountains, Arvanitika (a form of Albanian) around Athens, Turkish and Pomak in Western Thrace, Romani across the country, and a small surviving community of Ladino speakers. None of them has official status, and because the Greek census has not asked about language since 1951, the speaker numbers below are estimates from Ethnologue and other named sources rather than census counts.
Athens, Attica and the Saronic Gulf: Standard Greek and the Last of Arvanitika
The Greek heard on the streets of Athens is the national standard. It descends from Hellenistic Koine, which was itself based on Attic, the dialect of classical Athens, so the capital’s speech has a long claim to being the reference point. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, though, Greece wrote in two registers: the spoken vernacular, Demotic, and Katharevousa, a formal language rebuilt with ancient Greek grammar and vocabulary. The quarrel over which one should rule school, law and the press was known as the Greek language question, and it was settled only in 1976, when Demotic became the official language. Everything from road signs to parliamentary bills is now written in it.
Yet Attica was for centuries one of the most Albanian-speaking parts of Greece. The Arvanites arrived from what is now Albania in waves from about 1350 to 1600 and became the dominant population in parts of Attica, Boeotia and the Peloponnese until the 19th century. Their language, Arvanitika, belongs to the Tosk group of Albanian dialects. Parts of Athens and its suburbs were Arvanitic until the late 19th century, and until the early 20th century Albanian was the main language of the Greek fleet, because so many of its sailors came from Arvanite islands such as Hydra. Today its strongholds are East Attica, southern Boeotia, the south of Euboea, the north of Andros and the Saronic islands of Salamis, Poros, Agistri, Spetses and Hydra. The last census figure, from 1951, counted 22,736 “Albanophones”; later estimates range from about 30,000 to 140,000. Most Arvanites identify as Greek, younger people have largely shifted to Greek, and the language is endangered.
Modern Albanian is a separate story. Immigration since the 1990s made Albanians the largest foreign group in the country, 443,550 people in the 2001 census, so standard Albanian is now one of the most widely heard foreign languages in Athens and other cities.
Leonidio and the Parnon Slopes: Tsakonian, a Doric Survivor
Every living form of Greek except one descends from Attic Koine. The exception is Tsakonian, spoken in a handful of mountain towns and villages in Kynouria, on the slopes of Mount Parnon above the Argolic Gulf in the eastern Peloponnese. It comes from the Doric Greek of ancient Laconia, the region of Sparta, and Byzantine writers already linked the name Tsakonas to “Lakonas”, a Laconian. Speakers of standard Greek cannot understand it.
The main centres are Leonidio and Tyros, with villages such as Melana, Agios Andreas, Vaskina, Prastos, Sitaina and Kastanitsa. Geography kept the area isolated until the 19th century; schooling, roads and, from the late 1950s, electricity and mass media wore it down. One estimate puts the fall from about 200,000 fluent speakers in earlier times to between 200 and 1,000 by 2007, most of them elderly. Local schools have tried teaching it, so far with little success, and the language has no official status.
Further south, the Mani peninsula keeps its own Maniot dialect of Greek, one of several regional varieties that sit much closer to the standard than Tsakonian does.
Crete and the Aegean Islands: Cretan Greek’s Half a Million Speakers
The largest regional dialect is Cretan Greek, spoken by more than 500,000 people on Crete and by Cretans who have moved to Athens and other cities. It is rarely written and differs from the standard much less than Pontic or Tsakonian do. Several thousand Cretans who settled in Athens still use it, and so did communities descended from Cretan Muslims, in places as far away as the town of Al-Hamidiyah in Syria.
Cypriot Greek, spoken by about 659,000 people in Cyprus in 2011, is also heard among the many Cypriots who have settled in Greek cities. Greek is also official in Cyprus, which is why the two countries are usually listed together among the world’s Greek-speaking countries.
Epirus, Thessaly and the Pindus: Aromanian in Metsovo
The mountain spine of northern Greece is home to Aromanian, a Romance language related to Romanian. Its speakers are known in Greece as Vlachs, and they live mainly in Epirus, Thessaly, Aetolia-Acarnania and Western and Central Macedonia. Byzantine historian George Kedrenos recorded them in the region in the 11th century. The word Vlach itself was long used in the Balkans as a general name for shepherds, and the Pindean Aromanians are concentrated in and around the Pindus mountains of northern and central Greece.
The largest centre is Metsovo, called Aminciu in Aromanian, a town in the Pindus between Ioannina and Meteora. Estimates of Aromanian speakers in Greece run to about 250,000, and Minority Rights Group International put the Vlach population (including Megleno-Romanian speakers) at about 200,000 in 2015. Most Vlachs in Greece identify as Greek and are bilingual. A related language, Megleno-Romanian, is spoken by roughly 2,500 people in Greece and by others across the border in North Macedonia.
The Sarakatsani, another traditionally transhumant community of mountain shepherds in Macedonia and elsewhere in northern Greece, speak an archaic dialect of Greek rather than a separate language.
Thessaloniki and Greek Macedonia: Pontic Greek, Slavic Dialects and Ladino
Northern Greece took in most of the refugees of the 1923 population exchange with Turkey, and with them came Pontic Greek, the Greek of the southern Black Sea coast. Pontic developed apart from mainland Greek from the 11th century and is not fully intelligible with the standard. Its speakers now live mainly in Macedonia and Thrace; around 200,000 to 300,000 are considered active speakers, out of a far larger Pontic Greek population. A smaller group came from Cappadocia, whose Greek was thought extinct from the 1960s until a few speakers were found. In the 1990s, Pontic Greeks from Georgia, Russia and Ukraine added Russian and Georgian to the languages heard in Thessaloniki and the rest of Greek Macedonia.
Across Greek Macedonia, from Florina and Edessa in the west to Serres and Drama in the east, some families speak Slavic dialects close to Macedonian and Bulgarian; the eastern dialects are nearer Bulgarian, the central ones between the two. The 1928 census recorded 81,844 Slavo-Macedonian speakers, 1.3% of the population, with 38,562 in the Florina district alone. Many speakers call their speech simply dopia, “local”, and not all link it to a national identity. Minority Rights Group International estimated 100,000 to 200,000 ethnic Macedonians in 2015; Greece does not recognise them as a minority.
For more than four centuries Thessaloniki was also a Ladino-speaking city. Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by the 1492 Alhambra Decree settled there in large numbers, and the Judeo-Spanish they spoke became one of the city’s main languages; At their peak Jews made up 56% of the population. In 1943 about 50,000 of the city’s Jews were deported, most to Auschwitz, where nearly all were murdered, and many survivors later emigrated to Israel. Ladino is now kept up by between 2,000 and 8,000 people in Greece. Even older is Yevanic, the Greek dialect of the Romaniote Jews of Ioannina, which has only around 50 speakers left worldwide.
Western Thrace: Turkish, Pomak and Romani under the Treaty of Lausanne
The main minority Greece formally recognises is defined by religion, not language. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne exempted the Muslims of Western Thrace from the population exchange; the 1991 census counted about 98,000 of them, and the Greek government describes the minority as roughly 50% Turkish speakers, 35% Pomaks and 15% Roma. They live mainly in the regional units of Xanthi, Rhodope and Evros, in the region of East Macedonia and Thrace.
Turkish is the main language of the minority, and Thrace has 235 minority primary schools teaching in Greek and Turkish, plus minority secondary schools in Xanthi and Komotini. Ethnologue counted 40,000 Turkish speakers in Greece in 2014, including 9,700 native speakers; other estimates run to 50,000–60,000. The Pomaks, estimated at about 50,000 people in Western Thrace, speak a Slavic language close to Bulgarian, which Ethnologue lists with about 30,000 native speakers in Western Thrace.
Romani is not confined to Thrace. Of the 200,000 to 300,000 Roma in Greece, about 160,000 speak Romani, a language of north Indian origin; the variety used in Greece belongs to the Balkan Romani group. Armenian is kept up by about 20,000 of the 35,000 Armenians in Greece.
Why Greece Stopped Counting Languages After 1951
Every number above is an estimate because questions about language, ethnicity and religion were dropped from the Greek census after 1951. Earlier counts were themselves disputed: the 1907 census recorded 50,975 Albanian speakers, a figure its own organisers questioned, and most official figures published after 1907 have been criticised for playing down the country’s linguistic variety. Beyond the Muslim minority of Thrace, the state recognises Armenians (about 35,000) and Jews (about 5,500) as minority groups, but not linguistic minorities such as the Vlachs or Slavic speakers.
Greek Sign Language has its own legal standing: it is recognised as the official language of the Deaf community and was estimated in 1986 to be used by about 42,000 signers. In schools, English is the foreign language most Greeks learn, followed by German, French and Italian.
The overall picture, then, is a country where one language dominates public life far more than in most of its Balkan neighbours, with older languages surviving in specific valleys, islands and towns: Tsakonian on the Parnon slopes, Aromanian in the Pindus, Arvanitika on the Saronic islands, Turkish and Pomak in Thrace. Religion and language have often run along the same lines there, which is why our guide to religion in Greece covers the Muslim minority of Thrace from the other side, and the map guide to Greece’s geography shows how the mountains of Epirus and the Peloponnese kept these communities apart for so long.