KATHAREVOUSA

'Katharevousa' (, ) is a form of the Greek language, set in motion during the early 19th century by greek intellectual and revolutionary leader Adamantios Korais (1748-1833). A graduate of the University of Montpellier in 1788, Korais spent most of his life as an expatriate in Paris. Being a classical scholar, he was repelled by the Byzantine influence in Greek society and was a fierce critic of the ignorance of the clergy and their subservience to the Ottoman Empire. He held that education was a precursor to Greek liberation.
The “purified” Greek was to be the midpoint between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek. ''Katharevousa'' stressed both more archaic and archaicised forms of modern words, and a reduced form of the archaic grammar.
The purpose of its creation was to mediate the struggle between the “archaists” and the “modernists”. One reason the Archaists preferred Ancient Greek was that Modern Greek includes Latin, Italian and Turkish loan words; and Greece then was a part of the Ottoman Empire. The original name ''Katharevousa'' could have been translated as “clean one” implying a form of Greek without additional influences, as it may hypothetically have independently evolved from Ancient Greek, but in its modern greek connotation it means "formal one".
In later years, ''Katharevousa'' was used for official and formal purposes (such as politics, letters, official documents, and newscasting) while ''Dhimotiki,'' (δημοτική) ‘demotic’ or popular Greek, was the daily language. This created a diglossic situation whereby most of the Greek population was excluded from the public sphere and advancing in education. However, in 1976 ''Dhimotiki'' was made the official language and by the end of the 20th century full ''Katharevousa'' in its earlier form had become obsolete. However, the grammar and syntactical rules that Katharevousa adopted, and much vocabulary from Katharevousa, have come into contact with Dhimotiki during the two centuries of its existence, so that the project has made an observable contribution to the language as it is used today. [1]

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See also

★ Diglossia

★ Linguistic purism