Cypriot Greek

History

Cyprus was cut off from the rest of the Greek-speaking world from the 7th to the 10th centuries AD due to Arab attacks. It was reintegrated in the Byzantine Empire 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.

The oldest surviving written works in Cypriot date back to the Medieval period. Some of these are: the legal code of the Kingdom of Cyprus, the Assizes of Jerusalem; the chronicles of Leontios Machairas and Georgios Boustronios; 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 τσιαττιστά (tsiattistá, battle poetry, a form of playing the Dozens) and the tradition of ποιητάρηες (poiitáries, 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. Some Turkish Cypriots of Nicosia and Paphos were also speaking Cypriot Greek as their mother tongue according to early 20th century population records.

In the late 1970s, Minister of Education Chrysostomos A. Sofianos upgraded the status of Cypriot by introducing it in education. More recently, it has been used in music, e.g. in reggae by Hadji Mike and in rap by several Cypriot hip hop groups, such as Dimiourgoi Neas Antilipsis (DNA). Locally produced television shows, usually comedies or soap operas, make use of the dialect, for example with Vourate Geitonoi (βουράτε instead of τρέξτε) or Oi Takkoi (Τάκκος being a uniquely Cypriot name). The 2006 feature film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest features actor Jimmy Roussounis arguing in Cypriot Greek with actor Nej Adamson speaking 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 "Εκατάλαβα σε" ('I recognised you'). In the American mockumentary comedy horror 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 other variety of Modern Greek apart from Standard Modern Greek with a significant presence of spontaneous use online, including blogs and internet forums, and there exists a variant of Greeklish that reflects its distinct phonology.

Phonology

Studies of the phonology of Cypriot Greek are few and tend to examine very specific phenomena, e.g. gemination, "glide hardening". A general overview of the phonology of Cypriot Greek has ever been attempted only once, by Newton 1972, 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 Arvaniti 2010, p. 4, 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 post-alveolars. is pronounced similarly to , in terms of closure duration and aspiration.

Voiced fricatives are often pronounced as approximants 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). 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 . Pappas 2009 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). Arvaniti 2010 notes that speakers of some local varieties, notably that of Larnaca, "substitute" the geminate fricative for , but Pappas 2009 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, but rather a supra-local feature."

The palatal nasal is produced somewhat longer than other single nasals, though not as long as geminates. is similarly "rather long".

/x/ before /a/ is [h]

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 CJV (consonant–glide–vowel) clusters, namely:

• V → V
• V → V
• V → V or V
• V → V or V
• V → V or V
• V → V
• V → V
• V → V
• V → V

The glide is not assimilated, but hardens to an obstruent 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. Tserdanelis & Arvaniti 2001 have found that "for stops, in particular, this lengthening affects both closure duration and VOT", but Davy & Panayotou 2003 claim that stops contrast only in aspiration, and not duration. Armosti 2010 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.

• → τον Λούκα "Lucas" (acc.)
• → εν δα "[s/he] is here"
• → που την ρίζα "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. This process is not restricted to terminal nasals; singleton stops and affricates always become voiced following a nasal.

• → καπνίζουμεν πούρα "[we] smoke cigars"
• → αν τζ̌αι "even though"
• → την Κυριακήν "on Sunday"

Word-final is altogether elided before geminate stops and consonant clusters:

• → επιάσαμεν φκιόρα "[we] bought flowers"
• → πα' στην κκελλέ "on the head"

Like with , word-final assimilates to following and producing geminates:

• → ας σ̌ονίσει "let it snow"

Lastly, word-final becomes voiced when followed by a voiced consonant belonging to the same phrase, like in Standard Greek:

• → της Μάλτας "of Malta"
• → αγώνας δρόμου "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-last syllable in a word is rare and normally limited to certain verb forms. Because of that possibility, however, when words with antepenultimate stress are followed by an enclitic in Cypriot Greek, no extra stress is added unlike Standard Modern Greek in which stress falls only on one of the last three syllables), e.g. Cypriot Greek το ποδήλατον μου , Standard Modern Greek το ποδήλατό μου "my bicycle".

Grammar

An overview of syntactic and morphological differences between Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek can be found in Hadjioannou, Tsiplakou & Kappler 2011, pp. 568–9.

Cypriot Greek is known for having a more conservative grammatical system than Standard Modern Greek. One of the most distinctive conservative features of Cypriot Greek is the preservation of older verb forms and aspectual distinctions that have been lost in the standard language. For instance, where Standard Modern Greek uses a single form έκανε for both the simple past "he did" and the past continuous "he was doing", Cypriot Greek maintains a clear morphological distinction: έκαμεν "he did" and έκαμνεν "he was doing". This mirrors Classical Ancient Greek, which similarly distinguished ἔκαμεν and ἐκάμνεν for those respective meanings. These distinctions are still actively used in spoken Cypriot today, showcasing the dialect's conservative grammatical structure.

Another example is the third person plural present tense form. Where Standard Modern Greek uses κάνουν "they do", Cypriot Greek preserves the older form κάμνουσιν, identical to the Classical Attic Greek κάμνουσιν. This ουσιν ending, now archaic or lost in most other varieties of Greek, remains productive in the Cypriot dialect, further illustrating its retention of ancient morphological patterns.

Vocabulary

More loanwords are in everyday use than in Standard Modern Greek, largely because Standard Greek, now the official language of Cyprus, introduced many foreign borrowings into the island. In addition to these shared influences, Cypriot Greek also preserves a number of unique, locally developed loanwords from Old French, Italian, Occitan, and, increasingly, English. As a result, the vocabulary of Cypriot Greek is broader and more varied, drawing from both the standard and its own historical linguistic layers. Despite this lexical diversity, the dialect as a whole is more conservative than Standard Modern Greek, especially in terms of verbs, grammar and certain archaisms. For example, Cypriot Greek retains older forms such as πόθεν for “from where?”, an equivalent of the archaic English “whence.” Many everyday words also differ, such as συντυχάννω alongside μιλώ "I talk" and θωρώ in place of βλέπω "I look".

Some Arabic expressions, such as μάσ̌σ̌αλλα [ˈmaʃːalːa] "mashallah" and ίσ̌σ̌αλλα [ˈiʃːalːa] "inshallah", are sometimes used in Cypriot Greek. Ethnologue reports that the lexical similarity between Cypriot Greek and Demotic Greek is in the range of 84–93%.

Orthography

There is no established orthography for Cypriot Greek. Efforts have been made to introduce diacritics to the Greek alphabet to represent palato-alveolar consonants found in Cypriot, but not in Standard Modern Greek, e.g. the combining caron ⟨ˇ⟩, by the authors of the "Syntychies" lexicographic database at the University of Cyprus. When diacritics are not used, an epenthetic ⟨ι⟩—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 παντζάρι → Cypriot Greek ππαντζιάρι , Standard Modern Greek χέρι → Cypriot Greek σιέρι .

Geminates (and aspirates) are represented by two of the same letter, e.g. σήμμερα "today", though this may not be done in cases where the spelling would not coincide with Standard Modern Greek's, e.g. σήμμερα would still be spelt σήμερα.

Despite the centuries-long existence of Greek Cypriot literature, the dialect wasn't widely written until the rise of computer-mediated communication in the 2000s. Online and in text messaging, Cypriot Greek, like Standard Modern Greek, is commonly written in the Latin script, and English spelling conventions may be adopted for shared sounds, e.g. ⟨sh⟩ for (and ).

Some comparisons between Cypriot Greek and Standard Greek

Cypriot Greek demonstrates a prevalence of archaic elements. The following comparisons provide a visual representation of this phenomenon.

The tables below do not imply that they were written down the same in Attic Greek but it is simply using the modern Greek alphabet's pronunciation system applied on attic Greek for comparison purposes.

The classical attic Greek X was pronounced as an aspirated Κ similar to the English K. Θ = aspirated Τ, Γ = ΓΚ/ΓΓ and Β = ΜΠ. In classical attic Greek Η was pronounced a long Ε and not like the modern Greek I, Y

αγκρίζω is often confused for an English loan word but it's actually derived from the ancient αγρίζω, from άγριος.

Example texts of the dialect