When Technology Speaks Greek. All Kinds of Greek.
February 9 – International Greek Language Day
The International Greek Language Day is a reminder that our language goes far beyond Standard Modern Greek. It encompasses a broad spectrum of diachronic and dialectal varieties that also deserve their place in the digital world. Because Greek is not just one form of Greek; it’s Pontic, Cypriot, Cretan, Cappadocian, Southern Italian Greek, and the dialects of the Aegean, Ionian, Macedonia, Asia Minor. All of them children of the Hellenistic Koine. All of them living traces of communities and civilizations.
But they don’t all share the same fate. Standard Modern Greek is dominant, widely taught and present in education and media. Dialects, on the other hand, are often marginalized, underestimated, or abandoned and with them, the voices that speak them and the data that documents them are disappearing. So how can technology become a shield for Greek dialects? And what does AI have to do with International Greek Language Day?At Athena Research Center, every voice is heard
At Athena Research Center, the Institute of Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), in collaboration with the ARCHIMEDES Unit, leverages Artificial Intelligence and Language Technology to strengthen Greek dialects where it matters most today: in modern digital applications.
Research teams are applying advanced methods such as neural networks, dialogue systems, and Large Language Models. It’s a bit like swimming upstream: while modern AI requires vast amounts of data, dialects have very little. Still, researchers have developed open-access resources such as dialectal speech corpora, speech-to-text models, morphological and syntactic parsers, treebanks, annotation guidelines, and techniques for generating synthetic dialectal data using LLMs.