Katharevousa, Demotic and the Language of the Liturgy

From the early nineteenth century Greek public life ran on two registers at once. Katharevousa was a purified written form, built to bring the language back toward its ancient shape, and it was used for the state, the courts, the newspapers and the schools; demotic was the language people actually spoke. The two coexisted for a century and a half, and the argument between them was never only about grammar, because each carried a claim about what the modern nation was continuous with. Religion was one of the places the argument became violent: a demotic rendering of the gospels published in Athens at the beginning of the twentieth century provoked riots in which people were killed and the government fell, and a constitutional bar on unauthorised translation of the scriptures followed. Demotic became the official language of the state in 1976, and the polytonic orthography with its breathings and three accents was replaced by a single accent in 1982.

The liturgy did not move. The Church of Greece serves in the older Byzantine Greek, and proposals to read the scripture lessons in the modern language have repeatedly been raised and repeatedly withdrawn under objection, so the split between the language of worship and the language of the worshipper is a live question rather than a historical one.