Modern Greek dialectology: Achievements and problems.

Scientifi c approach to the Modern Greek dialects dates back as far as the late 19th century. For a long time the research was concentrated on description of separate dialects. In 1892 famous Greek linguist Georgios Hatzidakis proposed to divide Greek dialects into Northern and Southern. This subdivision remained the only attempt to classify Greek dialects for almost eighty years until Brian Newton managed to formulate a set of phonological features and to arrange all Greek dialects in fi ve groups. This classifi cation does not take into account even major phonetic and syntactic isoglosses, and not all Greek dialects were included. Nevertheless it still remains the best, and all posterior improvements and emendations do not seem very successful. The paper aims to analyze the main principles of the existing classifi cations and to discuss the selection of the isoglosses for the future investigation.