Ancient Spartan Dialect Tsakonika Still Alive Despite Ravages of Time ” width=”1024″> Statue of Leonidas in Greece. Tsakonika, the Spartan dialect, is still alive today. Credit: Dmpexr/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 Greece, the home of one the oldest civilizations on the globe, is blessed with thousands of priceless monuments. But perhaps no physical structure anywhere is as important than the living monument of a spoken language which originates directly from the ancient world. One such language still survives today, despite the ravages of time and the many reversals of fortune that Greece has known, in Leonidio–Tsakonika, the language of ancient Sparta, the warrior state which became the byword for an extraordinarily strict and regimented society.