Research Centre for Modern Greek Dialects

In 1908, Georgios Hatzidakis, the father of Greek Linguistics, persuaded the Greek Government to establish by Royal Decree a special Commission, assigned with the task to compile and publish the 'Comprehensive Dictionary of the Greek Language, from its first emergence to the present'.
This decision aimed at creating the first full-scale historical dictionary for the Greek Nation, since 'the dictionaries compiled from Korais onward, either general or dialectal, not only rarely satisfy the needs of the linguistic science, but most importantly, they do not concisely convey a general picture of the entire Modern Greek language, both of the standard variety and of the Modern Greek dialects'.
The initial target of embarking on the publication by 1921 was not fulfilled, for historical reasons. The following year, 1922 was a landmark in Modern Greek history, that delayed the publication of the Dictionary.
With the Presidential Decree of 14-3-1927, and according to the National Assembly's constitutional decision of the 18th of March 1926 'Regarding the Organization of the Academy of Athens' the Centre came under the jurisdiction of the Academy of Athens.
The Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek, both in its standard form and in its dialectal varieties has a monumental objective: the comprehensive collection of all lexical / functional items of Modern Greek (mainly spoken language ) and of their regional variants from 1800 onwards. It is called Historical because it examines the phonetic, morphological, semantic and syntactic changes of Modern Greek words diachronically.
The Centre is supervised by a Committee, composed of members of the Academy of Athens. With the Legislative Decree 4545/1966, article 2, the Archive of Toponyms and Personal Names has been attached to the Centre.
In 2003, the Academy of Athens renamed the Centre into 'Research Centre for Modern Greek Dialects - I.L.N.E.' (the abbreviation standing for 'Historical Lexicon of Modern Greek').

Contact Details
Address: 22, Alexandrou Soutsou str.,106 71 Athens
Tel: +30 211 2111 000
Fax: +30 210 3609 187
E-mail: [email protected]