| The youngest of the three major dialects of Classic Greek (the others being the Ionic and the Aeolic ones).
The Doric dialect was spoken in the Peloponnese (excepting Arcadia and Elis), some of the Aegean islands (Crete, Melos, Thera, Rhodes and several others), and most of Sicily and Southern Italy.
The Doric of Laconia, Crete and Southern Italy is usually called Severer (or Old) Doric, the Doric of other places is called Milder (or New) Doric.
Doric has survived in the poems of Pindar, the bucolic (or pastoral) idyls of Theocritus as well as the fragments from Tyrtaeus and Alcman. Traditionally all the Choral parts of Attic tragedy were written in Doric, but because many Attic playwrights did not really know Doric their writings are no more than "Doricized" Attic. | 
