The Greek language has a long history in Western culture, and is regarded by many scholars as the world's oldest recorded living language. Currently spoken by about 13 million people, mostly in Greece and Cyprus, Greek has enjoyed a long history of influencing Western languages, by way of Latin, Romance languages, and later Germanic languages.

Ancient Greek was the language of Socrates and Aristotle, and had profound influence on Latin and consequently Romantic languages. These changes were later passed on to English, which is host to many words of Greek origin, such as astronomy, athletics, democracy, mathematics, physics, theater, and rhetoric. Greek roots are commonly used to form new words, as was the case with anthropology, cinematography, isomer, and telephone, and many others.