Background

Language family: Indo-European / Hellenic / Greek

The adopted variety is Standard Modern Greek.
Speakers reside in a multitude of places, including Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Cyprus, Greece, and Ukraine.

Phonology

Consonants

There is some controversy around the phonemic status of voiced stops. Although some authors categorize them surfacing allophonically from homorganic nasal-voiceless stop sequences (Newton 1961 as cited in Arvaniti (2007), p. 7), Antoniou, Best, and Tyler (2008) explain that diachronically speaking, native speakers have come to perceive voiced stops as phonemic (p. 1). Given that Arvaniti (2007), Mirambel (1959), and Householder, Kazazis, and Koutsoudas (1964; both cited in Arvaniti 2007, 7) identify the voiced stops as independent phonemes, I have chosen to do so as well.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Velar
Stops	p b	t̪ d̪		k ɡ
Fricatives	f v	θ ð	s z	x ɣ
Nasals	m	n̪
Flaps			ɾ
Approximants			l

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	ε		o
Low		ɐ

Alphabet

Modern Greek includes two diacritics: the acute accent (΄) and the diaresis (¨) (Ktori, Heuven, and Pitchford 2008, 774). The acute accent marks stress, and the diaresis marks the hiatus or the enunciation of two independent adjacent vowels.

Grapheme
Uppercase	Lowercase	Phoneme	Comment
Α	α	/ɐ/
Β	β	/v/
Γ	γ	/ɣ/
Δ	δ	/ð/
Ε	ε	/ε/
Ζ	ζ	/z/
Η	η	/i/
Θ	θ	/θ/
Ι	ι	/i/
Κ	κ	/k/
Λ	λ	/l/
Μ	μ	/m/
Ν	ν	/n̪/
Ξ	ξ	/ks/
Ο	ο	/o/
Π	π	/p/
Ρ	ρ	/ɾ/
Σ	ς; σ	/s/
Τ	τ	/t̪/
Υ	υ	/i/
Φ	φ	/f/
Χ	χ	/x/
Ψ	ψ	/ps/
Ω	ω	/o/
Digraph
ΕΙ	ει	/i/
ΟΙ	οι	/i/
ΥΙ	υι	/i/
ΑΙ	αι	/ɛ/
ΟΥ	ου	/u/
ΑΥ	αυ	/ɐv/; /ɐf/	/ɐv/: preceding vowels or voiced consonants (Dawkins 1908, 218)
ΕΥ	ευ	/εv/; /εf/	/εv/: preceding vowels or voiced consonants (Dawkins 1908, 218)
ΜΠ	μπ	/b/
ΝΤ	ντ	/d̪/
ΓΚ	γκ	/ɡ/
ΓΓ	γγ	/ɡ/

Lenition Rules

Word-final /s/ becomes voiced when preceding a word-initial voiced consonant (Arvaniti 1999, 4).
Although rare, in fast speech, voiced stops may be realized as fricatives (Arvaniti and Joseph 2000, as cited in Arvaniti (1999), p. 2).
/ɾ/ may be realized as an alveolar approximant (Arvaniti 1999, 2–3).
/p/, /t̪/, and /k/ are often voiced intervocalically (Arvaniti 2007, 102).

Misc. Rules

/k/, /ɡ/, /x/, /ɣ/ surface as palatal allophones [c], [ɟ], [ç], [ʝ] in front of high vowels /i/ and /ε/ (Arvaniti 1999, 3).
In formal speech, voiced stops are pronounced with some prenasalization (Arvaniti 1999, 2), although this is becoming more obselete with younger generations.
In consonant clusters, nasals often assimilate in place to the following consonant (Arvaniti 1999, 2).
In fast speech, adjacent identical vowels across word boundaries degeminate (Arvaniti 1999, 4).

References

Antoniou, Mark, Catherine T. Best, and Michael D. Tyler. 2008. “Perceptual Evidence of Modern Greek Voiced Stops as Phonological Categories.” In Interspeech.

Arvaniti, Amalia. 1999. “Standard Modern Greek.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 29 (2): 167–72.

———. 2007. “Greek PhoneticsThe State of the Art.” Journal of Greek Linguistics 8 (1): 97–208. doi:10.1075/jgl.8.08arv.

Arvaniti, Amalia, and Brian D. Joseph. 2000. “Variation in Voiced Stop Prenasalization in Greek.” Glossologia.

Dawkins, R. M. 1908. “The Transliteration of Modern Greek.” The Annual of the British School at Athens.

Householder, Frederic W., Kostas Kazazis, and Andreas Koutsoudas. 1964. Reference Grammar of Literary Dhimotiki. Indiana University Press.

Ktori, Maria, Walter J. B. van Heuven, and Nicola J. Pitchford. 2008. “GreekLex: A Lexical Database of Modern Greek.” Behavior Research Methods 40 (3): 773–83. doi:10.3758/brm.40.3.773.

Mirambel, André. 1959. La Langue Grecque Moderne: Description et Analyse. Librairie Klincksieck.

Newton, Brian. 1961. “The Rephonemization of Modern Greek.” Lingua.

Greek

Shiying Yang