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Ionic Greek language   Ionic dialects spread among the numerous small islands of the Aegean Sea and on the coast of Asia Minor. Also Ionic migrants founded colonies in South Italy and in many point of the Black Sea shore. Ionic also included the Attic dialect, which further parted from it and became the Classical Greek language. The stylistically reconstructed forms of Ionian dialects are known from epic and lyric works, from inscriptions, and from Herodotus's "Historia".

Now the main peculiarities of Ionic morphology and phonetics:

a) the Common Hellenic long á became é (mátér > métér)

b) the Indo-European *w disappeared; other dialects preserved it much longer

c) special forms of plural personal pronouns (hémeis - we; Doric hames)

d) a -nai ending for athematic verb infinitives (e.g. bénai - to step)

e) presence of habitual iterative forms of the past tense with suffix -sk- (e.g. eipa - I said)

f) the form én for the 3rd person singular of the verb "to be" - derived from historical tenses like imperfect.
 

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