Professor who pushed for democracy via demotic discourse

At a time when Greeks protest in vain against economic austerity, it is hard to imagine how a dispute over language once provoked deadly riots in Athens and toppled the government.

For decades supporters of dimotiki, the version of Greek spoken by ordinary people, with borrowings from Turkish and Italian, battled unsuccessfully against the proponents of katharevousa, an archaising form that imitated the complicated syntax and vocabulary of the ancient playwrights and philosophers.

Emmanuel Kriaras, a lexicographer and literary critic who has died aged 107, campaigned throughout his academic career for dimotiki to be made the official written language - a vision finally realised in 1976 when he was almost 70 years old.

Kriaras' monumental 16-volume Dictionary of Medieval Greek Vernacular Literature, compiled over 30 years, testifies to his argument that dimotiki boasts a heritage just as rich as that of classical Greek. Another authoritative work, the Greek Dictionary of the Modern Demotic Language, which appeared in 1995, is widely used by students and language teachers.

To the so-called demoticists, katharevousa represented a form of cultural nationalism invented by 19th century politicians and educators seeking to establish the country's credentials as a European state after it won independence from Ottoman rule. Yet its hold on written Greek was contested by dissident poets, academics and newspaper editors.

The controversy turned violent in 1901, when troops opened fire on a crowd protesting at the translation into dimotiki of the New Testament, killing eight people. Amid popular fury the administration of Giorgos Theotokis, the prime minister, quit.

During the further three-quarters of a century it took to resolve the issue, a centrist government of the 1960s managed to abolish the old form. But under a policy of "reviving ancient Greek values" in public life, it was reintroduced by the next military junta to seize power - which in 1968 also purged Kriaras from his post as professor of medieval Greek literature at Thessaloniki university.

After democracy returned in 1974, a reformist government made dimotiki the official spoken and written language. A reinstated Kriaras then chaired a committee set up by the first socialist government in 1982 that proposed replacing a complex system of accenture with a single "monotone" accent to assist pronunciation. This swiftly adopted reform overjoyed schoolchildren, teachers and typesetters and in effect laid the language question to rest.

The son of a sea captain, Emmanuel Giorgos Kriaras was born in Piraeus on November 15 1906 (his birth date changed to November 28 with a switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar). He grew up in Khania, then the capital of Crete.

A scholarship took Kriaras to Athens university where, although already a demoticist, he received a degree in 1929 in ancient Greek literature. His first academic job, working in the medieval archive of the Athens Academy, could hardly have been better suited to an eager student of the vernacular.

Based on his archival work, Kriaras' doctoral thesis explored the origins of Erotokritos, a Cretan verse epic by Vicenzo Cornaro, composed in dimotiki around 1600 when the island was ruled by Venice. This story of star-crossed lovers is still popular in Crete, where local singers perform extracts set to music.

It was on a research visit to Germany in 1930 that Kriaras conceived his idea of compiling a medieval dictionary that went beyond scholarly boundaries set by Byzantine and ecclesiastical Greek.

Another study trip, to Paris in 1938, was cut short by the outbreak of war. During the Nazi occupation of Greece, Kriaras and his wife Katerina joined EAM, a communist-led resistance group. Both were imprisoned in a German-run internment camp. Afterwards he returned to Paris, studying for three years at the Ecole Speciale de Langues Orientales before being appointed professor in Thessaloniki.

Kriaras attributed his longevity to a happy marriage, interesting work - even in his 90s he was at his desk by 8.30am - and a simple diet. His wife died in 2000; they had no children. His last years were spent editing for publication a mass of correspondence with his peers on the language issue and medieval Greek studies.

Aged 102 he became possibly the world's oldest parliamentary candidate, running in an honorary position to boost the party list of the PanHellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) in the 2009 general election.

Yet Kriaras pulled few punches on Greece's economic implosion, telling one interviewer: "The politicians are responsible for this crisis but we all colluded . . . And if politics go wrong we all suffer." On his last birthday he said greetings and gifts were by then redundant, adding: "In our era there is no room for redundancies."

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