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Language code: el

Technical information about ISO 639 language code el

Documentation

The table below provides technical details for the Greek language, designated by the el code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

el

Name

Official

Greek

Native

Ελληνικά

Family
Hellenic
Scripts
Greek
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
Standard Modern (Demotic)Pontic GreekCappadocian GreekCypriot GreekCretan Greek
Related languages
Ancient GreekTsakonianPontic GreekCappadocian GreekYevanic
Key facts
Greek has the longest recorded history of any Indo-European tongue, with written evidence dating back over 3,400 yearsThe classical Greek alphabet was the first to mark vowels explicitly, influencing later scripts such as Latin and CyrillicModern Greek verbs preserve a full imperfective–perfective aspect distinction even though only four productive noun cases remainThousands of international scientific and technical terms are built from Greek rootsIn Greek punctuation, the mark () functions as a question mark, while the semicolon is written as a raised dot (·).
Sample phrase

Γεια σου, πώς είσαι;

Character encodings

ISO 8859-7, Windows 1253, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Greek belongs to the Indo-European language family, more precisely to the Hellenic subgroup. It is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and is recognized as a minority language in several countries, including Turkey. It is written using the Greek alphabet. It is estimated that there are more than 13 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

Greece

10M

Cyprus

1M

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Greek speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

el-CY – Greek (Cyprus)

el-GR – Greek (Greece)

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