Most of western languages adopt the Latin alphabet with minor variations. Arabic letters are adopted by quite a few other languages. The same is true for Eastern Europe with Cyrillic letters. Why was not the Greek alphabet adopted by others given the Greek prominence, power, and influence in the old ages? Aside from the sciences, we hardly see any use of the Greek alphabet except in Greece.

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    "Why was not the Greek alphabet adopted by others" - It was, Cyrillic is based on the Greek alphabet. – Lennart Regebro Dec 22 '13 at 3:13
  • The armenians adopted the greek alphabet IIRC – Jeroen K Dec 22 '13 at 9:13
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    @JeroenK: Armenian alphabet looks nothing like Greek. You probably mean Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian language that most Armenians speak fluently. – Michael Dec 22 '13 at 20:32
  • @LennartRegebro: Yes, Cyrillic was based mostly on the Greek language of Byzantium, (although some of the letter were borrowed from Hebrew and Latin). I guess the question refers to an earlier period of Greek domination, before Romans took it away from them. IMO the interesting question is: was Greek alphabet adopted by other languages before 3rd century BC? – Michael Dec 22 '13 at 20:42
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    My wild guess... influence of religions. The areas influenced by the Western Roman Empire (and Catholicism) early on adopted Latin writing while the areas influenced by Eastern Orthodox acquired Greek. Cyrillic script seems to have arisen first in Bulgaria and was at least anecdotally a product of Eastern Orthodox saints (i.e. St. Cyrill). – AlaskaRon Sep 27 '16 at 23:46

Because the territories where those languages originated were ruled by Rome, not Athens or Byzantium, for a semi-millennium. In areas where contact with Byzantium/Constantinople dominated contact with Rome, such as Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, the Cyrillic alphabet is primary.

Here is a map showing those countries where the Cyrillic alphabet is primary.


It was adopted widely. But later was replaced with Latin or the peoples were assimiliated.

  • Balkan peoples: Macedonians, Thracians, Illirians, Liburgians, Messapians, Phrygians,

  • Central European people: Helvetii (mentioned by Caesar as writing with Greek alphabet) and other varieties of Celts and Germanic peoples.

  • In Spain: Iberians (Ibero-Ionian script)

  • In Italy: Etruscans

and a lot of other peoples wrote in their languages using Greek alphabet.

  • Two small corrections here. Old Phrygian alphabetic writing is as old a Greek and has some few exlcusive letters, hence considered to be an independent alphabet (not Greek based, but deriving directly from Phoenician). The Macedonians had not a distinct alphabet, but were using Greek already from 740 BC (Pieria region and Aiani), which makes them one of the ealiest users of the alphabet in Greece. That last fact is rather unknown to most people. – Midas Jul 1 '14 at 12:02
  • Ultimately Latin and all Latin alphabets are derived from Greek, too! – user12566 Jun 24 '15 at 23:33

The Latin alphabet, as it has been mentioned so far, derives from a Greek alphabet.

That is, the Chalcidic alphabet. It was widely used in the areas of Chalkida and Eretria, in the island of Euboea and found its way to cities of Southern Italy through settlers of Cumae (also see this passage). From there, it went on to become the basis for Latin.

In searching for a good image, I could not find one from a widely accessed source, but here is another article by Wikipedia on archaic Greek which mentions the Chalcidic alphabet and here is an image of how the characters looked like originally.

Apart from Cyrilic which was also mentioned before, there were also significant interactions with the Coptic language.

  • Very well researched, which is why I upvoted. But it doesn't directly answer OP's question. – Mark C. Wallace Apr 15 '15 at 12:11
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    Thank you for your comment. My perception is that it replies in the negative to OP's question, in line with the majority of other responses. I was debating with myself whether or not this should really be a comment to T.E.D.s response but with the addition of the influence on Coptic and the existence of images showing the relevance of the Chalcidic alphabet to modern Latin, I decided to provide it as a separate answer. – A_A Apr 15 '15 at 12:22
  • Good point - I can understand why you'd have that debate. Would it make sense to update the answer with the contents of that comment to indicate that you're aware of the issue? – Mark C. Wallace Apr 15 '15 at 12:27
  • Thank you, given the public availability of our discussion in these comments, I don't see a reason to include it in the answer too. – A_A Apr 16 '15 at 14:35

Ancient Greece's energies were generally oriented towards their older civilized neighbors to the east. As such, nearly all the people they traded with or conquered already had an established writing system. The colonies and trade ties they established in the uncivilized west were almost entirely usurped by Rome in the runup and aftermath of the Second Punic war.

That being said, the Latin alphabet, which as a result of that is used by nearly all Western Indo-Europeans, was ultimately derived from the Greek alphabet. Much more recently the Cyrillic Script used for most Slavic languages (and several that aren't even Indo-European) uses Greek-inspired glyphs. If you combine these two scripts, it would be fair to say that Greek-derived alphabets are in use as the primary script in close to the majority of the land area of all inhabited continents on earth.


Well, I will provide my point of view which mostly coincides with the one of @Relaxed.

Greek alphabet was adopted by many people when Greek political and spiritual influence of Greek-speaking people was at its height. That said for example we can say that two of the most commonly used alphabet derive from Greek alphabet (that does not include them nowadays in the people using Greek alphabet though) as Latin and Cyrillic alphabet.

The adoption of an alphabet, as opposed to natural process of creating a language, is mainly a political choice. People (nowadays this means countries) choose a different alphabet, or if they don't used one up to then just choose one, which is always a political choice. Polish, Czechs and partially Serbian people use Latin alphabet to express their language. Serbian use both (official Cyrillic but in all other aspect I think Latin is predominant -any more expert can correct me on this one-) alphabets. Turkish people adopted Latin in 1923 for example which signified their attitude towards the west as opposed to the east (at that time anyway).

Often writing system that are adopted from people speaking different languages, with different phonemes produce variations of such writing systems (alphabet) in order to cope with new sounds found in the new languages. For example Greek alphabet itself derives from the Phoenician one that was altered enough to fit with the phonetic system of Greeks. Polish write "Łódź" but the first letter has nothing to do with L. It just look familiar. German write "Ä" (which stands for "AE" but uses a new letter) never found in Latin before. Other alphabets use not transcribable letters as in Turkish: ş is like harsh "s" which is different than s (also existing).

Latin is another example of a modified alphabet. And of course the alphabet as we know it is just the final (up to today that is not final as the ultimate ever) step of a process of importing letters in it. Latin did not had that many letters at first and on the other hand neither did Greek alphabet. For the evolution of Latin for example a quick view is wikipedia.

This explains the differences in letters that represent approximately the same phonemes like:

  • L -> Λ
  • D -> Δ (in modern Greek is like "th" of course but in ancient Greece time, when adoption took place it represented the same phoneme)
  • P -> Π
  • S -> Σ
  • F -> Φ

Also, this explains the use of approximately the same letter for different phonemes:

  • X (usually as "ks" double phoneme) -> Χ (as "h" in hotel or LateX if you are familiar with that pronunciation)
  • Η (as in "hotel" or no sound at all) -> Η (just another "i" sound in modern Greek or like a long εε == ee in ancient Greek)
  • P -> Ρ (read as "r" in Greek)

or less impressive (they are mainly the result of a shifting in modern Greek pronunciation):

  • B -> Β ("v" in modern Greek).

Another aspect that should be mentioned is that those alphabets mentioned started with the use of capital letters (now of course rarely used in common text besides primary names, begining of sentences, titles etc). So the comparison should be done to this letters not the lower case ones where the differences are more profound: A == A but a ~= α Β == Β but b ~= β E == E but e ~= ε Ζ == Ζ but z ~= ζ Η == η but h ~= η Ι == I but i ~= ι Κ == Κ but k ~= κ etc

So, the phrase it's Greek to me (although not referring to the alphabet but we can make overlook that) could be "less" Greek to me if capital letters were used instead e.g.:

αστροναύτης (meaning astronaut in Greek) would be ΑΣΤΡΟΝΑΥΤΗΣ which has:

  • 1 not Latin letter: Σ -> S
  • 3 letters with different pronunciation than in most languages using Latin alphabet: P read as "R" and
  • Y read here (as usually is read a "I") as "F"
  • H read as "I"

and all other letters are familiar.

The Latin alphabet we refer today is probably the English alphabet which has 26 letters while the Latin has only 23! So, in which degree do we use Latin alphabet today? Are all alphabets deriving from Latin alphabet the same. When it is considered a new alphabet. Remember that western alphabets derive from Latin which derived from ancient Greek which derived from Phoenician alphabet. S, can we say all those alphabets use the Phonetician one? I guess not. Not too many would accept that as a correct answer. So, we don't use Phonetician, not Greek but Latin? Well, my opinion is that depends on the definition. most people would argue that we use Latin but we already miss 3 letters if we do so: J, U and W. In other words this cannot be written in (plain) Latin:

You enjoy war

would become:

Yo enoy ar

And if we use only capital case as:


which does not make much sense!

So, I guess that explains why we Greek was (or wasn't depending of the definition) adopted by other people).

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    your last is nonsense. In lue of some letter, another letter or combination of letters is employed. J becomes either I or DZh depending on intent, for example. W becomes V usually, etc. etc. – jwenting Nov 12 '14 at 11:06
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    @jwenting, I think you missed the point I was trying to prove. You can always transcribe a word with more letters or similar sound ones. This does not make them part of the alphabet though. For example in Greeklish (Greek words transcribed using English alphabet you can write άνθρωποι read as "anthropi" but you can write it like "anthrwpoi", "anthropoi" or "antropi") – Eypros Nov 12 '14 at 11:47
  • IOV ENIOI VVAR, I guess.. – Luís Henrique Sep 23 '16 at 21:24

It was, for the most part. While there are many other writing systems, both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets (and, in fact, the use of an alphabet – as opposed to other type of writing systems including abjads like the Arabic or Phoenician writing system) all derive from the Greek one.

Definitional issues aside, the Greek alphabet has been extremely influential and you do in fact see Greek-inspired letters everywhere. Even cultures that have their own writing systems (e.g. the Chinese or Arab worlds) have some limited use for the latin alphabet.

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    The Semitic alphabets (Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic etc.) do not derive from the Greek. In fact, the Greek alphabet derives from the Phoenician. – fdb Jul 31 '14 at 13:09
  • @fdb That's true but those are not alphabets at all. – Relaxed Jul 31 '14 at 14:23
  • Of course they are alphabets. Each letter of a word represents a single phoneme. – fdb Jul 31 '14 at 14:29
  • @fdb I never disputed any of that but they have no glyphs for vowels and are more properly called abjads. – Relaxed Jul 31 '14 at 14:31
  • @fdb I tried to clarify that in my answer since it seemed to confuse you. – Relaxed Jul 31 '14 at 14:33

Greek script was used to write Bactrian, an Iranian language spoken in what is now Afghanistan. That is about as far as you can get from Greece.

  • Seems to me that Easter Island is farther from Greece than Afghanistan. – Mark C. Wallace Apr 15 '15 at 12:11
  • @MarkC.Wallace. I think we were talking about Greek script, not Latin script. – fdb Apr 15 '15 at 12:24

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