Greek has been spoken in Greece for about forty centuries. For a number of these centuries, Greek was also the primary language of the Roman Empire. After the fall of Rome in 476, the Greek language remained widely used across Europe. Greek was also the official language of the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire), until Constantinople was overtaken by the Turks in the year 1453. During the Ottoman Empire's domination of the region, the decline of reading and writing among Greek speakers caused the language to change greatly. From these changes the Modern Greek language began to take shape. Modern Greek is a living tongue and one of the world's richest languages with more than half a million words. It is said that educated speakers of the modern Greek are able to readily decipher the ancient dialects. There are 12,000,000 speakers of Greek living in both Greece as well as on the island of Cyprus today.