National Competence Centre Cyprus

The Languages of Cyprus

The official languages of Cyprus are Greek and Turkish. English is widely spoken and dominates advertisements, public notices and more. Minority languages are Armenian and Cypriot Maronite Arabic. Greek and Turkish are both spoken in a Cypriot dialectal variety. The Greek-Cypriot language is mainly used in oral speech. The written form is used in poetry and literary speech. Cypriot Greek is a variety of Modern Greek and it differs from Standard Modern Greek on different levels of the linguistic system (lexicon, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and pragmatics).

Features of Cypriot Greek, which differ from the Standard Greek:

• The sound system contains geminates and palato-alveolar consonants. The Greek alphabet does not represent these sounds. There have been discussions to add diacritics for the Cypriot Greek.
• Because of a history with many different contact situations to other languages, the vocabulary contains many loan words of many different languages.

More detailed information about Greek can be found on the NNC page for: Greece

NCC Lead Cyprus

Dr. Dora Loizidou teaches at the Department French and Modern Languages at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests include Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), Information and Communication Technologies in Education (ICTE), blended learning and digital learning environments. She is a member of LIDILEM research laboratory (Grenoble Alpes University), as well as of Méthodal OpenLab (inter-university research laboratory: University of Cyprus & Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). She is also a member of the Telecollaboration research initiative (Grenoble Alpes University).