Greek is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to the territories that have had populations of Greeks since antiquity: Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Turkey, Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.