Editing Dorians (section)

===Peloponnesian dialect replacement===
The origin of the Dorians is a multifaceted concept. In modern scholarship, the term has often meant the location of the population disseminating the Doric Greek dialect within a hypothetical [[Proto-Greek]] speaking population. The dialect is known from records of classical northwestern Greece, the [[Peloponnesus]] and [[Crete]] and some of the islands. The geographic and ethnic information found in the [[Western culture|West]]'s earliest known literary work, the ''[[Iliad]]'', combined with the administrative records of the former [[Mycenaean Greece|Mycenaean]] states, prove to universal satisfaction that East Greek (Ionian) speakers were once dominant in the Peloponnesus but suffered a setback there and were replaced at least in official circles by West Greek (Doric) speakers. A historical event is associated with the overthrow, called anciently the ''Return of the Heracleidai'' and by moderns the [[Dorian Invasion]].

This theory of a return or invasion presupposes that West Greek speakers resided in northwest Greece but overran the Peloponnesus replacing the East Greek there with their own dialect. No records other than Mycenaean ones are known to have existed in the [[Bronze Age]] so a West Greek of that time and place can be neither proved nor disproved. West Greek speakers were in western Greece in classical times. Unlike the East Greeks, they are not associated with any evidence of displacement events. That provides circumstantial evidence that the [[Doric Greek|Doric dialect]] disseminated among the Hellenes of northwest Greece, a highly-mountainous and somewhat-isolated region.