 The ancient Greek language has been in use for many centuries, in fact, even before the times of documented history. For those who travelled from Asia to the more productive lands to the south and established themselves in a number of areas in Greece, a distinct dialect arose in each; the four major dialects were:-
The Arcado-Cyprian parlance, of which we know very little, is the progeny of a variety used in the Mycenaean times in at least the Peloponnese and perhaps a couple of the southern islands. The decoding and interpretaion in 1952 of the so-called Linear B script (by British linguist Michael Ventris), revealed it as a forerunner (1500-1400 bc) of Arcado-Cyprian. Some examples of which were found on tablets during the archaeological digs made on the mainland of Greece and on the island of Crete after the start of the twentieth century, The findings of these researchers illustrate that the Greeks were a literate population for a number of centuries before the era of the very first Greek poet, Homer (c. 8th century bc). The Doric idiom, which was mainly used in northern Greece, gradually displaced the Arcado-Cyprian dialect found in the Peloponnese and then came to be prevalent in the southern Cyclades, Crete, and in the colonies in close-by Italy, Asia Minor and Sicily. Most poems of Theocritus were written in this dialect, in the 3rd century B.C. and the 'tongue' of Pindar has a number of character traits found in Doric.
The indigenous peoples of many islands in the Aegean and on most of the western shore of Asia Minor spoke with the Ionic dialect. Indeed, it was employed in certain literary works of the 5th century B.C.; most notable are the writings of the historian Herodotus and the doctor Hippocrates. The language of the Homeric poems is the result of a literary tradition that seems to have origins in the Mycenaean, passed down through Aeolic and Ionic, and given final shape in Attic; the largest element in it is Ionic. The standard form of classical Greek was the Attic language, developed from the Ionic dialect, of Athens and the surrounding district of Attica and differed from the other Ionic forms primarily in its contraction of vowels. The Attic dialect superseded all others and became the chief literary language largely as a consequence of the dominant role of Athenian art, philosophy, and drama. Such was the political supremacy of Athens during and after the 5th century B.C. Its dominant influence was increased by way of its use by the greatest contemporary intellects, including the orators Demosthenes and Plato, the playwrights Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and the historians Xenophon and Thucydides. The shift of population from Greece moved to settlements in the Middle East in the 4th century B.C. They did so after the great conquests of Alexander the Great and the extension of Macedonian rule around the same time. During this Hellenistic phase, as it was known, the Attic vernacular was spoken by the cultured classes as well as by the emigrants and many merchants. It became the ancient Greek language common to the whole of the Middle Eastern region.
It was called Koine and it stretched right the way through all regions where Greek had an impact. It became the preferred ancient Greek language of the legal profession, all business and of literature all over the Hellenistic empires. Very quickly Koine became separated into two distinct groups - popular tongue (vernacular) and literary Koine. The literary patois was claimed and used by the erudite cultured classes, who maintained a spirited and autonomous academic and artistic existence and, cultivated the language to fulfill their own requirements, particularly those of conceptual thinking on the disciplines of social and physical sciences, grammar and philosophy. Simultaneously, everything was made simpler by the eradication of the many extraneous and irregular grammatical structures, and changes of pronunciation occurred. Vanished was the harmonious characteristic of the unadulterated ancient Greek language dialect of Athenian Attic; vowel significance started to be flattened out and diphthongs to have a single sound. Conversely, the colloquial speech was less impacted by either classical memories or by the more recent progress of Hellenistic considerations. It extracted more from the expressions of Middle Eastern languages and suffered more severely from breakdown of the traditional grammar. It is recognised from documents and letters on papyrus, and gradually became the preferred choice of lower-class writers in their literary works. This is demonstrated, most importantly, in the four Gospels in the Bible's New Testament, which in addition, display an unusual form of Koine, with a powerful Semitic admixture. Later Church fathers wrote in the literary language.
Unfortunately for them, this Atticist movement was not as triumphant as they'd have wished for, despite spirited support from the 2nd century grammarian Phrynicus and the philosopher Galen and the dazzling use of the dialect by such writers as Lucian. Many great writers of the 2nd century and later, including the essayist and biographer Plutarch and the geographer Pausanias, used the literary Koine, but Atticists also continued to arise and occasionally dominated the literary scene, for instance, the great 4th-century orator, Libanius. With the destruction of the libraries in Alexandria in the civil wars of the 3rd century and by the Roman emperor Theodosius in 191 and the closing of the Athenian schools of philosophy by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in 529, even the literary language, which was deviating more and more from the spoken and living vernacular, became confined to the Church, to a few scholars, and to the hack writers of the time. With the decline of the Byzantine Empire, its territory became divided into small independent states. The literary Koine, which was confined to the great cultural centres, remained static, but the vernacular Koine broke up into many local dialects, developing further as it was influenced by the migrating peoples in the Middle East: the Venetians, Turks, Bulgarians, and Albanians, among others. The Balkans meanwhile steadily became cut off from the great naval and commercial enterprises of Western Europe, which was increasingly being concerned with the New World and the resulting Modern Greek language; the end of the ancient Greek language.
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Aeolic was spoken principally in the districts of Aeolis, Thessaly, and Boeotia. It was the language of the poets Alcaeus and Sappho and of three of the idylls of Theocritus. 
As the emigrants socialised with other races, changes in ancient Greek language occurred; thus, Attic was the basis of a new kind of Greek. 
Throughout the first two centuries A.D. a number of academics campaigned for a return to the untainted ancient Greek language of Attic Greek as used in the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. 
