Greek Language/Vowels

Greek vowels have similar pronunciations as those of Spanish. If you know Spanish, then you will have an easy time pronouncing these. Do not automatically apply standard English vowel pronunciations to Greek words! You will probably be pronouncing them wrong. Please refer to the page linked at the end of this article for sound clips of the correct prounciations.

You will probably have noticed that some of the letters are redundant; Greek has three letters representing the sound /i/ ('ee') and two representing the sound /o/ ('oo'). This is because in Classical Greek the different letters did actually have different sounds associated with them. However, over the centuries, the pronunciations shifted to what they are today.