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Greek (e???????, IPA&_160;[e?lini'ka] or e??????? ???ssa, IPA&_160;[e?lini'k?i '?lo?sa]) is an Indo-European language spoken by 15-22 million people, mainly in Greece and Cyprus but also by minority and emigrant Greek communities in numerous other countries. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries.[4] Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family and has been written in the Greek alphabet since the 9th century in Greece and the 4th century in Cyprus. Before, it was written in Linear B in the mid-2nd millennium BC and the Cypriot syllabary in the first half of the 1st millennium BC respectively. The Greek language enjoys a high level of respect worldwide, as it is the language of one of the most influential civilizations in human history and one of the greatest literatures of all time, the Greek literature, which has a continuous history of three thousand years. It has lent many scientific and technical words to English and other Western languages, and has been estimated that 12% of the English vocabulary is of Greek origin.[5] Greek is also the original language of the New Testament, and served as the lingua franca of the Hellenistic period and later in the regions which were part of the Byzantine Empire, such as Middle East, North Africa, Southeastern Europe and Asia Minor. 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 the Indo-European languages, its 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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