The grammar of Modern Greek, as spoken in present-day Greece and Cyprus, is essentially that of Demotic Greek, but it has also assimilated certain elements of Katharevousa, the archaic, learned variety of Greek imitating Classical Greek forms, which used to be the official language of Greece through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Modern Greek grammar has preserved many features of Ancient Greek, but has also undergone changes in a similar direction as many other modern Indo-European languages, from more synthetic to more analytic structures.
General characteristics
Syntax
The predominant word order in Greek is SVO (subject–verb–object), but word order is quite freely variable, with VSO and other orders as frequent alternatives. Within the noun phrase, adjectives precede the noun (for example, , , 'the big house'), and possessors generally follow it (for example, , , 'my house'; 'Nick's house'). If both an adjective and a possessive occur, the possessive may be placed before the noun: ⇔ , 'my big house'. Some other alternative constructions involving the opposite order of constituents are possible as a marked option (e.g. 'the big house'; 'Nick's house')
Greek is a pro-drop language, and subjects are typically not overtly expressed whenever they are inferable from context. While the word order of the major elements within the clause is fairly free, certain grammatical elements attach to the verb as clitics and form a rigidly ordered group together with it; this applies particularly to unstressed object pronouns, negation particles, the tense particle , and the subjunctive particle . Likewise, possessive pronouns are enclitic to the nouns they modify.
Morphology
Greek is a largely-synthetic (inflectional) language. Although the complexity of the inflectional system has been somewhat reduced in comparison to Ancient Greek, there is also a considerable degree of continuity in the morphological system, and Greek still has a somewhat archaic character compared with other Indo-European languages of Europe. Nouns, adjectives and verbs are each divided into several inflectional classes (declension classes and conjugation classes), which have different sets of endings. In the nominals, the ancient inflectional system is well preserved, with the exception of the loss of one case, the dative, and the restructuring of several of the inflectional classes. In the verbal system, the loss of synthetic inflectional categories is somewhat greater, and several new analytic (periphrastic) constructions have evolved instead.
Characteristics of the Balkan language area
Modern Greek shares several syntactic characteristics with its geographical neighbours, with which it forms the so-called Balkan language area (Sprachbund). Among these characteristics are: The lack of an infinitive. In Greek, verbal complementation in contexts where English would use an infinitive is typically formed with the help of finite (subjunctive) verb forms (e.g. , , literally 'I-want that I-go', i.e. 'I want to go'). The merger of the dative and the genitive case. In Greek, indirect objects are expressed partly through genitive forms of nouns or pronouns, and partly through a periphrasis consisting of the preposition (, 'to') and the accusative. The use of a future construction derived from the verb 'want' ( → ). A tendency to use pre-verbal clitic object pronouns redundantly (clitic doubling), doubling an object that is also expressed elsewhere in the clause: for example, (, 'I saw it, the car", literally 'It I-saw the car'). On the other hand, one prominent feature of the Balkan language area that Greek does not share is the use of a postposed definite article. The Greek article (like the Ancient Greek one) stands before the noun.
Accent
Modern Greek has a stress accent, similar to English. The accent is notated with a stroke (΄) over the accented vowel and is called (oxeia, "acute") or (tonos, "accent") in Greek. The former term is taken from one of the accents used in polytonic orthography which officially became obsolete in 1982.
As in Ancient Greek, in Modern Greek the accent cannot be placed before the antepenultimate syllable. As a result, in many words that have the accent on their antepenultimate in their base form, the stress shifts to the next syllable in inflection forms with longer affixes. For example, (, "lesson") but and etc. In some words, the accent moves forward even without the addition of a syllable. For example, (, "human") but , and . This accentuation is inherited from Ancient Greek, where long vowels and diphthongs occupied two morae, having the same effect as the addition of a syllable.