[6] While the bulk of surviving public and private inscriptions found in ancient Macedonia were written in Attic Greek (and later in Koine Greek),[7][8] fragmentary documentation of a vernacular local variety comes from onomastic evidence, ancient glossaries and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the Pella curse tablet.
[5][23] In addition, some linguists use the term "Hellenic" to refer to modern Greek in a narrow sense together with certain other, divergent modern varieties deemed separate languages on the basis of a lack of mutual intelligibility.
[25] The Griko or Italiot varieties of southern Italy are also not readily intelligible to speakers of standard Greek.
[27] Greek linguistics traditionally treats all of these as dialects of a single language.
Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian[33] (see also Graeco-Armenian) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan).