Cypriot Greek ( el, κυπριακή ελληνική or ) is the
variety of Modern Greek that is spoken by the majority of the
Cypriot populace and
Greek Cypriot diaspora
The Greek-Cypriot diaspora refers to the Greek Cypriot population of Cyprus, or people who are of Greek Cypriot origins, who live abroad because of either economic reasons, or were part of the Greek population that was uprooted from their homes in ...
. It is considered a divergent dialect as it differs from
Standard Modern Greek
The linguistic varieties of Modern Greek can be classified along two principal dimensions. First, there is a long tradition of sociolectal variation between the natural, popular spoken language on the one hand and archaizing, learned written form ...
in various aspects of its
lexicon
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or fo ...
,
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
,
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
,
morphology,
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...
and even
pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...
, not only for historical reasons, but also because of geographical isolation, different settlement patterns, and extensive contact with
typologically distinct languages.
Classification
Cypriot Greek is not an evolution of ancient
Arcadocypriot Greek
Arcadocypriot, or southern Achaean, was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and in Cyprus. Its resemblance to Mycenaean Greek, as it is known from the Linear B corpus, suggests that Arcadocypriot is its de ...
, but derives from Byzantine
Medieval Greek
Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek, Byzantine Greek, or Romaic) is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the Ottoman c ...
. It has traditionally been placed in the
southeastern group of Modern Greek varieties, along with the dialects of the
Dodecanese
The Dodecanese (, ; el, Δωδεκάνησα, ''Dodekánisa'' , ) are a group of 15 larger plus 150 smaller Greek islands in the southeastern Aegean Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, off the coast of Turkey's Anatolia, of which 26 are inhabited ...
and
Chios
Chios (; el, Χίος, Chíos , traditionally known as Scio in English) is the fifth largest Greek island, situated in the northern Aegean Sea. The island is separated from Turkey by the Chios Strait. Chios is notable for its exports of mast ...
(with which it shares several phonological phenomena).
Though Cypriot Greek tends to be regarded as a
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
by its speakers, it is unintelligible to speakers of Standard Modern Greek without adequate prior exposure. Greek-speaking Cypriots are
diglossic in the
vernacular
A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...
Cypriot Greek (the "low" variety) and Standard Modern Greek (the "high" variety). Cypriot Greek is itself a
dialect continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated vari ...
with an emerging
koine
Koine Greek (; Koine el, ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, hē koinè diálektos, the common dialect; ), also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-reg ...
. Davy, Ioannou & Panayotou (1996) have argued that diglossia has given way to a "post-diglossic
ialectalcontinuum
..a quasi-continuous spread of overlapping varieties".
History
Cyprus was cut off from the rest of the Greek-speaking world from the 7th to the 10th century AD due to Arab attacks. It was reintegrated in the
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...
in 962 to be isolated again in 1191 when it fell to the hands of the
Crusaders. These periods of isolation led to the development of various linguistic characteristics distinct from
Byzantine Greek
Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek, Byzantine Greek, or Romaic) is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the Ottoman c ...
.
The oldest surviving written works in Cypriot date back to the
Medieval period
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
. Some of these are: the legal code of the
Kingdom of Cyprus
The Kingdom of Cyprus (french: Royaume de Chypre, la, Regnum Cypri) was a state that existed between 1192 and 1489. It was ruled by the French House of Lusignan. It comprised not only the island of Cyprus, but it also had a foothold on the Ana ...
, the
Assizes of Jerusalem
The Assizes of Jerusalem are a collection of numerous medieval legal treatises written in Old French containing the law of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and Kingdom of Cyprus. They were compiled in the thirteenth century, and are the largest ...
; the chronicles of
Leontios Machairas and Georgios Voustronios; and a collection of sonnets in the manner of
Francesco Petrarca. In the past hundred years, the dialect has been used in poetry (with major poets being
Vasilis Michaelides and
Dimitris Lipertis). It is also traditionally used in folk songs and (, battle poetry, a form of playing
the Dozens
The Dozens is a game played between two contestants in which the participants insult each other until one of them gives up. Common in African-American communities, the Dozens is almost exclusively played in front of an audience, who encourage the ...
) and the tradition of (, bards).
Cypriot Greek had been historically used by some members of the
Turkish Cypriot community, especially after the end of
Ottoman control and consequent
British administration of the island. In 1960, it was reported that 38% of the Turkish Cypriots were able to speak Greek along with
Cypriot Turkish
Cypriot Turkish (''Kıbrıs Türkçesi'') is a dialect of the Turkish language spoken by Turkish Cypriots both in Cyprus and among its diaspora.
History
Emanating from Anatolia and evolved for four centuries, Cypriot Turkish is the vernacu ...
. Some Turkish Cypriots of Nicosia and
Paphos
Paphos ( el, Πάφος ; tr, Baf) is a coastal city in southwest Cyprus and the capital of Paphos District. In classical antiquity, two locations were called Paphos: Old Paphos, today known as Kouklia, and New Paphos.
The current city of P ...
were also speaking Cypriot Greek as their
mother tongue
A first language, native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother tong ...
according to early 20th century population records.
In the late 1970s, Minister of Education
Chrysostomos A. Sofianos
Chrysostomos A. Sofianos ( el, Χρυσόστομος Α. Σοφιανός 1939 – 27 February 2023) was a Greek Cypriot educator who became known because of his role in advocating and strategizing the educational reform of Cyprus in the 1980s fr ...
upgraded the status of Cypriot by introducing it in education. More recently, it has been used in
music
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...
, e.g. in reggae by Hadji Mike and in rap by several Cypriot hip hop groups, such as (DNA). Locally produced television shows, usually comedies or soap operas, make use of the dialect, for example with ( instead of ) or ( being a uniquely Cypriot name). The 2006 feature film ''
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'' features actor Jimmy Roussounis arguing in Cypriot with another crew member speaking
Kibrizlija (Cypriot Turkish) about a captain's hat they find in the sea.
Peter Polycarpou routinely spoke in Cypriot in his role as Chris Theodopolopoudos in the British television comedy series ''
Birds of a Feather''. In a July 2014 episode of the American TV series ''
The Leftovers'', Alex Malaos's character uses the dialect saying "" ('I understood'). In the American
mockumentary comedy horror
Comedy horror, also known as horror comedy, is a literary, television, and film genre that combines elements of comedy and horror fiction. Comedy horror has been described as able to be categorized under three types: "black comedy, parody and sp ...
television series ''
What We Do in the Shadows'', actress
Natasia Demetriou, as the vampiric character Nadja, occasionally exclaims phrases in Cypriot.
Today, Cypriot Greek is the only variety of Modern Greek with a significant presence of spontaneous use online, including
blog
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in Reverse ...
s and
internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least tempora ...
s, and there exists a variant of
Greeklish
Greeklish, a portmanteau of the words Greek and English, also known as Grenglish, Latinoellinika/Λατινοελληνικά or ASCII Greek, is the Greek language written using the Latin alphabet. Unlike standardized systems of Romanization of G ...
that reflects its distinct
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
.
Phonology
Studies of the phonology of Cypriot Greek are few and tend to examine very specific phenomena, e.g.
gemination
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
, "glide hardening". A general overview of the phonology of Cypriot Greek has only ever been attempted once, by , but parts of it are now contested.
Consonants
Cypriot Greek has geminate and
palato-alveolar consonants, which Standard Modern Greek lacks, as well as a contrast between and , which Standard Modern Greek also lacks. The table below, adapted from , depicts the consonantal inventory of Cypriot Greek.
Stops and affricate are
unaspirated and may be pronounced weakly
voiced in fast speech. are always heavily
aspirated and they are never preceded by nasals, with the exception of some
loans, e.g. "shampoo". and are
laminal
A laminal consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue in contact
with upper lip, teeth, alveolar ridge, to possibly, as ...
post-alveolars. is pronounced similarly to , in terms of closure duration and aspiration.
Voiced fricatives are often pronounced as
approximants
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
and they are regularly
elided when
intervocalic. is similarly often realised as an approximant in weak positions.
The palatal lateral approximant is most often realised as a singleton or geminate lateral or a singleton or geminate fricative , and sometimes as a glide (
cf. yeísmo
''Yeísmo'' (; literally "Y-ism") is a distinctive feature of certain dialects of the Spanish language, characterized by the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme (written ) and its merger into the phoneme (written ), ...
). The circumstances under which all the different variants surface are not very well understood, but appear to be favoured in stressed syllables and word-finally, and before . identifies the following phonological and non-phonological influencing factors: stress, preceding vowel, following vowel, position inside word; and sex, education, region, and time spent living in Greece (where is standard). notes that speakers of some local varieties, notably that of
Larnaca
Larnaca ( el, Λάρνακα ; tr, Larnaka) is a city on the south east coast of Cyprus and the capital of the district of the same name. It is the third-largest city in the country, after Nicosia and Limassol, with a metro population of ...
, "substitute" the geminate fricative for , but contests this, saying that, " is robustly present in the three urban areas of Lefkosia, Lemesos and Larnaka as well as the rural Kokinohoria region, especially among teenaged speakers ... the innovative pronunciation is not a feature of any local
patois
''Patois'' (, pl. same or ) is speech or language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. As such, ''patois'' can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects or vernaculars, but not commonly to jargon o ...
, but rather a supra-local feature."
The palatal nasal is produced somewhat longer than other singleton nasals, though not as long as geminates. is similarly "rather long".
The alveolar trill is the geminate counterpart of the tap .
Palatalisation and glide hardening
In analyses that posit a phonemic (but not phonetic)
glide , palatals and postalveolars arise from (consonant–glide–vowel) clusters, namely:
The glide is not assimilated, but hardens to an
obstruent
An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...
after and to after . At any rate, velar stops and fricatives are in
complementary distribution with palatals and postalveolars before front vowels ; that is to say, broadly, are
palatalised to either or ; to or ; and to .
Geminates
There is considerable disagreement on how to classify Cypriot Greek geminates, though they are now generally understood to be "geminates proper" (rather than clusters of identical phonemes or "
fortis" consonants). Geminates are 1.5 to 2 times longer than singletons, depending, primarily, on position and stress. Geminates occur both word-initially and word-medially. Word-initial geminates tend to be somewhat longer. have found that "for stops, in particular, this lengthening affects both closure duration and
VOT", but claim that stops contrast only in aspiration, and not duration. undertook a perceptual study with thirty native speakers of Cypriot Greek, and has found that both closure duration and (the duration and properties of) aspiration provide important cues in distinguishing between the two kinds of stops, but aspiration is slightly more significant.
Assimilatory processes
Word-final
assimilates with succeeding consonants—other than stops and affricates—at word boundaries producing post-lexical geminates. Consequently, geminate voiced fricatives, though generally not phonemic, do occur as allophones. Below are some examples of geminates to arise from
sandhi
Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...
.
* → "Lucas" (acc.)
* → "
/heis here"
* → "from the root"
In contrast, singleton stops and affricates do not undergo gemination, but become fully voiced when preceded by a nasal, with the nasal becoming
homorganic
In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from ''homo-'' "same" and ''organ'' "(speech) organ") is a consonant sound that is articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, , and are homorganic consonants of one another sinc ...
. This process is not restricted to terminal nasals; singleton stops and affricates always become voiced following a nasal.
* → "
esmoke cigars"
* → "even though"
* → "on Sunday"
Word-final is altogether
elided before geminate stops and consonant clusters:
* → "
ebought flowers"
* → "on the head"
Like with , word-final assimilates to following and producing geminates:
* → "let it snow"
Lastly, word-final becomes voiced when followed by a voiced consonant belonging to the same phrase, like in Standard Greek:
* → "of
Malta
Malta ( , , ), officially the Republic of Malta ( mt, Repubblika ta' Malta ), is an island country in the Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an archipelago, between Italy and Libya, and is often considered a part of Southern Europe. It lies ...
"
* → "race"
Vowels
Cypriot Greek has a five-vowel system that is nearly identical to that of Standard Modern Greek.
Close vowels following at the end of an utterance are regularly reduced (50% of all cases presented in study) to "fricated vowels" (40% of all cases, cf. Slavic
yers), and are sometimes
elided altogether (5% of all cases).
In glide-less analyses, may alternate with or , e.g. "cage" → "cages", or "
koulouri" → "koulouria"; and, like in Standard Modern Greek, it is pronounced when found between and another vowel that belongs to the same syllable, e.g. "one" (f.).
Stress
Cypriot Greek has
"dynamic" stress. Both consonants and vowels are longer in stressed than in unstressed syllables, and the effect is stronger word-initially. There is only one stress per word, and it can fall on any of the last four syllables. Stress on the fourth syllable from the end of a word is rare and normally limited to certain verb forms. Because of this possibility, however, when words with antepenultimate stress are followed by an enclitic in Cypriot Greek, no extra stress is added (unlike Standard Modern Greek, where the stress can only fall on one of the last three syllables), e.g. Cypriot Greek , Standard Modern Greek "my bicycle".
Grammar
An overview of syntactic and morphological differences between Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek can be found in .
Vocabulary
More loanwords are in everyday use than in Standard Modern Greek. These come from
Old French
Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
,
Italian,
Occitan,
Turkish and, increasingly, from
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
. There are also Arabic expressions (via Turkish) like "
mashallah
''Mashallah'' ( ar, مَا شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ, '), also written Masha'Allah, Maşallah ( Turkey and Azerbaijan), Masya Allah ( Malaysia and Indonesia), Maschallah ( Germany), and Mašallah (Bosnia), is an Arabic phrase that is used to ex ...
" and "
inshallah
''In sha'Allah'' (; ar, إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ, ʾIn shāʾ Allāh ), also spelled In shaa Allah, InshAllah, Insya Allah and İnşAllah is an Arabic language expression meaning "if god wills" or "god willing". It was mentioned i ...
". Much of the Cypriot core vocabulary is different from the modern standard's, e.g. in addition to "I talk", instead of "I look", etc. A historically interesting example is the occasional use of archaic instead of for the interrogative "from where?" which makes its closest translation to the English "whence" which is also archaic in most of the English speaking world.
''
Ethnologue
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensi ...
'' reports that the
lexical similarity
In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. ...
between Cypriot Greek and
Demotic Greek
Demotic Greek or Dimotiki ( el, Δημοτική Γλώσσα, , , ) is the standard spoken language of Greece in modern times and, since the resolution of the Greek language question in 1976, the official language of Greece.
"Demotic Greek" ( ...
is in the range of 84–93%.
Orthography
There is no established orthography for Cypriot Greek. Efforts have been made to introduce
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s to the
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...
to represent
palato-alveolar consonants found in Cypriot, but not in Standard Modern Greek, e.g. the
combining caron , by the authors of th
"Syntychies" lexicographic databaseat the
University of Cyprus. When diacritics are not used, an epenthetic —often accompanied by the systematic substitution of the preceding consonant letter—may be used to the same effect (as in
Polish), e.g. Standard Modern Greek → Cypriot Greek , Standard Modern Greek → Cypriot Greek .
Geminates (and
aspirates) are represented by two of the same letter, e.g. "today", though this may not be done in cases where the spelling would not coincide with Standard Modern Greek's, e.g. would still be spelt .
In
computer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is defined as any human communication that occurs through the use of two or more electronic devices. While the term has traditionally referred to those communications that occur via computer-mediated forma ...
, Cypriot Greek, like Standard Modern Greek, is commonly written in the
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...
, and English spelling conventions may be adopted for shared sounds, e.g. for (and ).
See also
*
Languages of Cyprus
*
Arcadocypriot Greek
Arcadocypriot, or southern Achaean, was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and in Cyprus. Its resemblance to Mycenaean Greek, as it is known from the Linear B corpus, suggests that Arcadocypriot is its de ...
for the ancient Greek spoken on Cyprus
Footnotes
Explanatory notes
Citations
Bibliography
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Further reading
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{{Greek language
Varieties of Modern Greek
Greek, Cypriot
Cyprus–Greece relations