Expert: Maria - 3/4/2007

Question
Who was the first to speak greek?

Answer
Hello,

In Linguistics there is no answer to such a question, of course, since there is no one who was the first to speak any language. All the languages in fact originate from the efforts of many individuals over the centuries.
For example, the Greek language  belongs to the Indo-European(or Aryan) family of languages, i.e. an unrecorded prehistoric language spoken some time before 2000 BC  in an area between and including India and Europe.  
Indo-European is in fact the name given by scholars  for geographic reasons to the large and well-defined family that includes most of the languages of Europe, past and present, as well as those found in a vast area extending across Iran and Afghanistan to the northern half of the Indian subcontinent. In modern times this family has spread by colonization throughout the Western Hemisphere.

In short, the Indo-European languages have the same  characteristics  with respect to vocabulary and grammar so that  have led many scholars to postulate that they are all descended from an original parent language, called Proto-Indo-European, whose speakers migrated or moved away from each other, losing contact, and then their language broke up into a number of tongues. These tongues later also split up still further, eventually giving rise to the many modern Indo-European languages that are:
-GREEK GROUP[Ancient and Modern Greek]
-ROMANCE GROUP[ Latin and then Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian]
-GERMANIC GROUP [English, German,  Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish]
-SLAVIC GROUP[Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech]
-ILLYRIAN GROUP[Albanian].

Hope you are less confused.
Best regards,
Maria