What Language Did Socrates Speak? (Helpful Content!)

Socrates would have spoken ancient Greek, specifically the Attic dialect that all Athenians spoke. Though we only know about Socrates through the accounts of his students and other Athenians, assuming he did exist we can say for certain he spoke ancient Greek given the place he lived during his life.

Socrates is one of the single most important figures in western philosophy, with many crediting him with singularly spawning recognizable western philosophy out of the more investigative, early-scientific lines of questioning of his own forebears.

It is hard to overstate his position in history, and yet at the same time what we truly know for certain about him is quite limited.

Let’s find out more.

What was Socrates’ native language?

Socrates native language was what we would today call ancient Greek.

Ancient Greek is a single, recognized language and yet at the same time there were many variations of it across the Mediterranean world in the late Bronze Age and subsequent centuries.

We can say, then, without ambiguity or qualification that Socrates would have spoken Ancient Greek, though we can also be a lot more precise than this.

Greece in Socrates time was separated into what we today call city states.

There were many self-governing cities across Greece who may have been allies with one another or enemies; places such as Delphi and Sparta, and of course, Athens.

Athens was the place which spawned much of what we think of as Greek philosophy in the ancient world.

Most of the most well-known Greek philosophers were Athenians, or they taught or were schooled at the Athenian academy; Socrates, of course, but also his pupil Plato and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle.

Socrates, then, was an Athenian, and thus would have specifically spoken the Attic dialect of that city.

This would have been mutually intelligible with other Greek dialects, and indeed the Attic dialect was and is considered the prestige Greek dialect and the basis of the ancient Greek that is taught today.

Many vitally important works of Greek antiquity were written in Attic, not just the works of the Athenian philosophers but also playwrights such as Euripides and Aristophanes.

It’s worth noting that there has been some question in the past about the historicity of Socrates and whether such a man really existed or was the invention of Plato.

In modern scholarship, there is really no debate about this.

Though we have no direct accounts of Socrates himself, we have enough independent accounts of his life by others to leave little doubt he really existed.

Is Socrates Greek or Latin?

Socrates was Greek, not Latin.

He existed long before the heyday of the Roman Empire, and though Latin would have been being spoken during his lifetime, it would not have been very close to him and it would not have held the prestige that it did later on.

At this time, even though Greece was not an empire or a centralized power in any useful sense, it was still among the greatest powers in this region of the world.

Indeed, even later on when Latin was the official language of the Roman Empire and the Empire’s arms stretched as far as North Africa and Mesopotamia, dialects of Greek would still have been spoken by Roman soldiers in places further afield than Rome and Central Europe.

Greek and Latin existed alongside one another, though Greek was certainly the prestige language first, and endured to a large extent even once Latin had become more common.

Socrates was not Latin in any sense.

He was a Greek through and through.

With that said, though, was he able to speak any languages other than Greek?

Could Socrates speak other languages?

The unfortunate truth is we have no real way of knowing with certainty whether Socrates could speak other languages, much less which languages if he could.

It is fairly safe to assume that he knew languages other than his own, given his life was devoted to study of many different kinds and he apparently had more than a few things to say about language itself.

There were many languages being spoken at this time in this part of the world, and Socrates could have known any of them.

With such limited historical records on the man himself, it’s impossible to answer a question like this with any certainty.

Can anyone still speak Ancient Greek?

Lots of people can still speak ancient Greek, although of course no one speaks it as their native language.

Indeed, the study of ancient Greek is one of the cornerstones of a degree in classics, and so it is taught in academic departments all over the world.

Modern Greek and ancient Greek would also have some degree of mutual intelligibility, so in that sense the language has endured to the modern day.

As mentioned, Socrates dialect of Greek, Attic, was and remains today the prestige version of ancient Greek that would be the benchmark for all future study of classical Greek.

So, again, it is fairly safe to assume that Socrates was indeed a real person, despite not having any of his actual writings surviving.

This makes it very hard to reconstruct his actual philosophy, but it does not mean that we can’t be certain of the language he spoke.

He, like all his Athenian contemporaries, would have spoken Ancient Greek and specifically its Athenian dialect, Attic.

This is one thing we can say about him with absolute certainty.