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 this sounds, why it is discussed 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 sides for: Greece.