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Language Policy and Language Planning in Cyprus
Language Policy and Language Planning in Cyprus
Language Policy and Language Planning in Cyprus
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To cite this article: Xenia Hadjioannou, Stavroula Tsiplakou & Matthias Kappler (2011):
Language policy and language planning in Cyprus, Current Issues in Language Planning,
DOI:10.1080/14664208.2011.629113
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Current Issues in Language Planning
2011, 1–67, iFirst Article
The aim of this monograph is to provide a detailed account of language policy and
language planning in Cyprus. Using both historical and synchronic data and adopting
a mixed-methods approach (archival research, ethnographic tools and insights from
sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis), this study attempts to trace the
origins and the trajectories of language polices in Cyprus and to relate these to issues
of ethnicity, community and national identity formation, language maintenance and
language shift, as well as the varying constructions of the role of language in
education. It will be shown that, while linguistic variation and multilingualism were
historically a core feature of the linguistic communities of Cyprus, the end of the
anticolonial struggle and the separation of the island’s two major linguistic
communities post-1974 has helped to establish effectively monolingual language
policies, with a strong prioritization of national standard languages as opposed to
sociolinguistically stigmatized varieties and minority languages. The monograph will
also discuss language moribundity and prospects for potential reversal of language shift.
Keywords: Armenian; attrition; Cypriot Arabic; Cypriot Greek; Cypriot Turkish;
de-dialectization; diglossia; koinéization; Kurbetcha; levelling
1. Introduction
The island of Cyprus is located in southeast Europe at the intersection of three continents:
Europe to the northwest, Africa to the south and Asia to the east and north. Cyprus is the
third largest island of the Mediterranean; Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya and
Greece are in its immediate vicinity.
The Mycenaeans settled in Cyprus extensively from the twelfth century B.C.E., and
over the next millennia Cyprus underwent Phoenician, Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Mace-
donian, Roman, Frankish (1192), Venetian (1489), Ottoman (1571) and British rule (1878–
1960) (Cobham, 1908; Hitchens, 1997). The modern Cypriot state, the Republic of Cyprus,
was founded in 1960 after the island gained its independence from the British Empire. Inter-
national treaties established the territorial sovereignty of the Republic of Cyprus over the
area of the island (MFA, 2010a) and its Constitution (1960) was designed to represent its
two major ethnic (also religious and linguistic) communities, the Greek Cypriots and the
Turkish Cypriots, which represented 77 and 18% of the population, respectively, according
to the official census of 1960 (Panayotou & Pavlou, 2000). However, political unrest in the
relationship between the island’s two major communities commenced shortly after the
establishment of the Republic of Cyprus and escalated into a war in 1974. As a result of
the war, 36.2% of the sovereign area of the Republic of Cyprus is under Turkish occupation
(Government Web Portal, 2010a; see map of Cyprus in Figure 1). The war itself and the
exchange of populations that followed the armed conflict has also led to the geopolitical
separation of Cyprus’ two major ethnic/linguistic communities, with the Greek Cypriots
inhabiting the south part of the island and the Turkish Cypriots inhabiting the north; effec-
tively, ‘contact between the two groups, including language/communication’ (Özerk, 2001,
p. 260) has since been minimal. Although the impermeability of the buffer zone separating
the two regions was somewhat relaxed in 2003, when the Turkish Cypriot administration
started allowing Cypriot Greeks (CGs) to enter the area under their control1 and robust
cross-visiting developed (Karoulla-Vrikki, 2009), and despite a preponderance of bi-com-
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munal projects aiming at understanding and reconciliation (see, e.g. AMIDEAST, 2010;
United Nations Development Program [UNDP], 2010), communication between the two
communities remains sparse.
At present, Cyprus continues to be a divided country. The Republic of Cyprus is a Euro-
zone-participating member of the European Union, with a primarily service-based economy
(CIA, 2010). According to the European Commission (2004),
Cyprus’ main economic activities are banking, tourism, craft exports and merchant shipping
[…] In 2001 the degree of urbanization in the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus
was 68.9% (485,082 out of the total 703,529 inhabitants). In 2002 the Republic of Cyprus
had a GDP per capita of €18,500 (equivalent to 80% of the EU average), and a low unemploy-
ment rate (3.4%). The EU is Cyprus’s largest trading partner (54% and 52% respectively of
Cyprus’s exports and imports in the year 2002). The services sector is the most important
one, employing 65% of the population. (n. p.)
The population in the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus is mostly Greek
Cypriot, though in recent decades a significant number of foreign nationals have moved
there for long-term or permanent settlement (CYSTAT, 2010).
The northern part of the island was declared an independent state in 1983 (self-pro-
claimed as Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus or Kuzey Kıbrıs Türk Cumhuriyeti in
Turkish); this entity is recognized only by Turkey and Pakistan. Katircioglu (2006)
reports that the major sectors of the economy of the northern part of the island are ‘agricul-
ture, industry, tourism and education’ but notes that the political isolation resulting from the
lack of international recognition has not allowed for adequate development of the economic
infrastructure. According to the European Commission (2004), in the northern part of
Cyprus ‘the economic situation is considerably weaker (in 2002 the GDP was estimated
around €4500 per capita): there is no independent monetary policy, and trade is heavily
dependent on the Turkish market’ (n. p.). The population mainly comprises Turkish
Cypriots who lived in Cyprus pre-1974 and their descendants, and settlers/immigrants
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from Turkey. Tables 1 and 2 show various population distribution figures in the two
parts of the island.
In this monograph we examine the language situation and issues of language planning
in Cyprus following a systematic, data-driven approach. Because the geopolitical separ-
ation of Cyprus’ two major ethnic communities has established two de facto separate
and fundamentally different entities, this study examines two distinct ‘cases’, namely the
language situation and issues of language policy and planning in the Republic of Cyprus
and in the northern part of the island, which is under the Turkish Cypriot administration.
We use historical and synchronic data and a mixed-methods approach involving several
data sources and modes of data analysis. Specifically, we scrutinize policy-setting docu-
ments produced by key language-planning agencies, both formal and informal; we under-
take a meta-analysis of historical, linguistic and educational research directly or indirectly
addressing language issues in the two communities under study; and we use sociolinguistic
a
The figures come from CYSTAT (2010) and they represent data collected at the end of 2009. They refer to
population residing in the government-controlled area of the island. CYSTAT reports that the total population is
892,400, in which the estimated number of Turkish Cypriots is included.
b
The figures come from the 2006 census conducted in the area under Turkish Cypriot administration (State
Planning Organization, 2006). As discussed in Section 6.2.4, the accuracy of these numbers has been
challenged by scholars and political stakeholders.
c
These figures include individuals from Turkey who moved to the northern part of Cyprus after the war in 1974 and
their descendants. Though many have been granted citizenship by the Turkish Cypriot administration, the Republic
of Cyprus considers them illegal settlers. According to the Statistical Service (2009), their numbers are estimated at
160–170 thousand.
and Critical Discourse Analysis tools to analyze ethnographic data depicting language use
in various Cypriot contexts.
In what follows, we first present the linguistic profile of Cyprus in order to familiarize
readers with the historical and synchronic linguistic context(s) of language-planning endea-
vors on the island. We then provide information regarding language spread in the Republic
of Cyprus, and we discuss language policy in terms of agents, content and stated and
unstated objectives. We conclude with a discussion of issues of language maintenance
and prospects. The same issues are addressed in reference to the northern part of Cyprus
in Section 6, contributed by Matthias Kappler.
(γλωσσικό ζήτημα in Greek), which involved the diglossic situation between the vernacular
(δημοτική/dimotiki) and katharevousa (καθαρɛύουσα), the official language of the state at
the time, ‘an artificial language “purged” of all non-Hellenic vocabulary and grammar
acquired over the centuries and therefore very close to Ancient Greek’ (Persianis, 1998,
p. 74). The form of SMG adopted in education and in formal public interactions was
based on southern varieties (mainly Peloponnese ones), but at the same time, it incorporated
katharevousa elements and loans and calques from other languages. Notably, the adoption
of SMG signalled the levelling of most regional varieties of Greek (Mackridge, 2009).
Standard Turkish (ST), which is recognized as the official language of the Turkish
Cypriots, belongs to the Turkic subgroup of the Altaic family of languages. Also the official
language of Turkey, ST is spoken by about 55 million people in Turkey as well as in Bul-
garia, Cyprus, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece. The modern period
for the Turkish language commenced in 1928 with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s language
reform program; this involved a consistent attempt at breaking from Turkey’s Ottoman
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past, which, in terms of language, meant that the Arabic script was abandoned in favor
of an almost phonetic writing system based on the Latin alphabet. Moreover, a systematic
attempt was made to ‘purge’ the Turkish vocabulary of Arabic and Persian elements
(Göksel & Kerslake, 2005, p. ix; Lewis, 1999). ST is based on the variety spoken in Istanbul
and it exhibits typical Turkic features such as vowel harmony, agglutination and head-final
structures (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005).
In addition to the two official languages of the state, due to Cyprus’ history as a British
colony (1878–1960), English has also been used in various realms of public life in the
Republic of Cyprus, including the courts of law, various civic services and many fields
of private enterprise. As is further discussed in the section on the historical development
of language policies and practices, though English is still used residually in the public
sector, the translation of the Cyprus Law in 1995, combined with a series of policy
decisions which, at face value, sought to enforce constitutional provisions on language,
led to Greek becoming the only language used in the courts and in the civil service.
sedentary dialects of Greater Syria, but it has also received considerable influence from the
phonology of CG’ (Trudgill & Schreier, 2006, p. 1887). According to Roth (2004), the posi-
tioning of Cypriot Arabic toward CG as a majority language and toward classical Arabic as
the standardized alternative ‘work against its preservation, since the language has already
ceased to be actively used by the younger generations’ (Goutsos & Karyolemou, 2004,
p. 10). Roth (2004) reports that the recent transformations of the dialect at various levels
have led to the development of a new variety exhibiting instability at the level of syntax
(heavily influenced by CG), and stability at the phonological level. Still, where conversion
with CG ‘is not possible, the final outcome is attrition and loss of the language’ (Goutsos &
Karyolemou, 2004, p. 10).
Western Armenian is spoken residually by the 3000-strong Armenian community of
Cyprus, the second religious minority recognized by the Cyprus Constitution. Though
Armenians have been present in Cyprus since the sixth century (Government Web
Portal, 2010b; PIO, 2010a), their numbers significantly increased between 1894 and
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1923 as a result of the ethnic cleansing practices waged against Armenians who lived in
the Ottoman Empire. At that time, approximately nine thousand Armenians sought
refuge in Cyprus. Most used Cyprus as a transitional home before relocating elsewhere
(mostly to Britain and the USA), whereas approximately 1300 chose to settle in Cyprus per-
manently. Though originally Armenians elected to live in the Turkish Cypriot quarters of
Cypriot cities because of their familiarity with the Turkish language and Turkish customs
(Pattie, 1997), politically they chose to belong to the Greek Cypriot community following
the Referendum of 1960, and they presently reside in the area controlled by the Republic of
Cyprus (Dietzel & Makrides, 2009; Hadjilyra, 2009).
Cypriot Armenians identify the (Western) Armenian language as their first language.
However, this was not truly the case until the mid-twentieth century, since the Armenians
living in Cyprus before the twentieth century, as well as the refugees fleeing persecution in
the Ottoman Empire, spoke primarily Turkish. ‘To reverse this situation, a conscious effort
to teach the [Armenian] language to the new generations was undertaken in the early twen-
tieth century, including those families in which parents had very little knowledge, if any, of
the language’ (Goutsos & Karyolemou, 2004, p. 11). Through a slow process of formal
language learning, Armenian started to take hold in the Cypriot Armenian community,
and by the 1940s ‘its use came to be considered natural’ (Goutsos & Karyolemou, 2004,
p. 11). The Western Armenian language ‘is recognised and protected by the Cyprus govern-
ment as a minority language, according to the provisions of the European Charter for
Regional or Minority Languages’ (Government Web Portal, 2010b, n. p.). Western Arme-
nian is one of the languages of instruction in the three Armenian elementary schools (known
as Nareg) and in the junior high school added to Nareg Nicosia in 2005, after the closing
down of the Melkonian Boarding School, which had served as a secondary school for
Armenian youth from all over the world (Government Web Portal, 2010b; PIO, 2010a).
Unfortunately, ‘there is a complete lack of studies on the sociolinguistic situation of the
Armenian community and the structural peculiarities of the (Western) Armenian variety
spoken by its members’ (Goutsos & Karyolemou, 2004, p. 10).
The Latins, the third religious community recognized by the Cyprus Constitution, do
not speak a distinct language variety of their own but have been linguistically assimilated
into CG and SMG.
The third minority language traditionally spoken in Cyprus is Kurbetcha or Gurbetcha,
a variety of Romani about which little is known. Kurbetcha/Gurbetcha is residually spoken
by the Roma or Kurbet of Cyprus, whose (reported) numbers vary between 500 and 1000,
and who have traditionally also spoken Turkish. In 1960, the Roma of Cyprus were not
Current Issues in Language Planning 7
granted minority community status in the Constitution because of ‘uncertainty about their
numbers, their life-style and the fact that most were Turkish-speaking (and Muslim), and
only a few were Greek-speaking (and Christian)’ (Trimikliniotis & Demetriou, 2009,
n. p.); rather, they were deemed to be members of the Turkish Cypriot community. Until
1974, they lived a nomadic lifestyle, but after the war most moved north, where they
switched to a more settled way of life. According to Williams (2000), though it is com-
monly thought that the shared Muslim religion is what led the Roma to move north, in
reality ‘their affinity is more closely tied to the Turkish language than it is to a religious
persuasion’ (n. p). Kurbetcha/Gurbetcha has received little scholarly attention, and it is
not recognized as a minority language by the European Charter for Regional and Minority
Languages. It appears that, since 1974, Kurbetcha/Gurbetcha has for the most part been
replaced by Turkish and at present it is known only by the older members of the Roma com-
munity (Office of the Law Commissioner, 2009; Williams, 2000).
In its dealings with the European Union regarding the protection of national minorities
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and minority languages, the Republic of Cyprus has chosen to designate as minorities only
‘those national minority groups who had a traditional presence on the island at the time of
the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960 and have Cypriot citizenship’ (Office
of the Law Commissioner, 2009, p. 3). However, this definition excludes a number of other
linguistic communities who currently live in the Republic of Cyprus. As discussed in the
section on immigrant languages (Section 3.4), these communities represent immigrant
groups who have made their way to Cyprus since the 1980s, including groups from
Georgia, Russia and the Ukraine (see Roussou & Hatzigianni-Yangou, 2001).
Similarly, CT stands in a diglossic relationship with ST. The CT dialect can be tentatively
placed in the Anatolian dialect group (Johanson & Demir, 2006, p. 2; but see Jennings, 1993;
Oakley, 1993). The few existing studies of CT indicate that it displays distinctive phonetic, mor-
phological and syntactic features, most striking among which are voicing of plosives word-
initially, distinct tense forms, subjunctive/optative forms (Kappler & Tsiplakou, forthcoming
a), subject-verb-object constituent order, the Cypriot-specific use of the particle mIş (Demir,
2003; Johanson, 2002; Kappler &Tsiplakou, forthcoming), focus and wh clefts and rightward
subordination (Kappler, 2008); the latter are variously attributed to the influence of English
and Greek or to the historical origins of CT. Not much is known about CT regional varieties.
Arguably, levelling and koinéization are also at work in CT (for further details see Section 6.2.3).
3. Language spread
3.1 The languages of education
Education in the Republic of Cyprus is compulsory for children between 6 and 15 years of
age. As was previously mentioned, currently all state schools adhere to SMG as the official
language of literacy. Language education is spread over at least 10 hours per week in
elementary school and 6–8 hours per week in junior and senior high school. Language edu-
cation in state schools is guided by the National Language Curriculum of the Republic of
Cyprus, which, up until recently, has been virtually identical with the national curriculum of
Greece. Implementation of the Greek language curriculum in the Republic of Cyprus is
typically assured by the exclusive use of language textbooks produced by the Greek Min-
istry of Education and Culture and the Greek Pedagogical Institute for use across all Greece
(MOEC, 2002; PI, 2001). The CG dialect is not formally taught at any level.
Currently, English is taught for two hours per week from the fourth grade of elementary
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school onwards. All students take at least two hours of English per week throughout their
public school education. However, senior high-school (Lykeio) students have the option of
taking additional four or six periods of English per week (Tsiplakou, 2009b). The new
national curriculum (MOEC, 2010a), the implementation of which is scheduled to com-
mence in the fall of 2011 (MOEC, 2011a), provides for an expansion of English instruction,
which is currently set to begin as early as kindergarten, and provisions have been made for
infusing English language mini-lessons in all subjects. According to the new curriculum,
the teaching of English in public schools aims at:
. ‘adequate perception and comprehension’ of the English language and of the cultural
elements associated with it;
. the enhancement of students’ self-image and awareness of their own culture;
. the development of positive attitudes toward people from other linguistic commu-
nities and cultures; and
. the cultivation of the students’ ability ‘for communication and interaction, oral and
written, initially in rudimentary and ultimately in developed and complex form’
(MOEC, 2010b,4 p. 455).
The curriculum calls for a focus on the communicative approach to teaching and learn-
ing language, on students’ diverse learning needs and characteristics, on orientation toward
multiculturalism, on fostering life-long learning and on teaching English through its inte-
gration in content-based learning.
Notably, despite the significant presence of English in the weekly schedule of public
education, an overwhelming majority of Greek Cypriot school children also take private
classes in English. This trend signals a deep commitment on the part of Greek Cypriot
parents to ensuring that their children become fluent in English, but also a mistrust of the
state school system’s capacity to accomplish this objective adequately.
French is introduced as a required two-hours-per-week subject in the first grade of
junior high school (Gymnasio) and remains so until the end of the first grade of senior
high school (Lykeio). Beginning from the second grade of Lykeio, foreign language elec-
tives and options are expanded. The foreign languages offered at this level are English,
French, German, Italian, Russian and Turkish. The minimum language requirement for
the last two grades of junior high school involves the study of at least two of these
languages for no less than two teaching periods per week for each language. Students
may choose to include up to 20 hours of foreign languages per week, with each language
10 X. Hadjioannou et al.
being taught 2, 4 or 6 hours per week, depending on the preference of the student. The cur-
ricular requirements for foreign languages in secondary education are delineated in a
unified foreign language curriculum. The preamble to this curriculum states:
The general purpose of the teaching of Foreign Languages is for the students to acquire the
necessary communicative competencies for communicating effectively in languages beyond
their native one, thereby broadening their cultural experiences and developing positive attitudes
and behaviors toward diversity. All citizens of the Republic of Cyprus, as European citizens,
should henceforth learn at least two European languages beyond their native language.
(MOEC, 2010b, p. 140)
some of the private elementary and high schools have SMG as the language of instruction,
in most the language of instruction is English, as a good number of them aim to prepare
students for successful participation in the British education system and in British tertiary
education in particular. Though language curriculum practices vary across different schools,
most tend also to include SMG as a separate subject and/or as an instructional medium for
certain subjects.
in many education systems in favor of more naturalistic, communicative models that assumed
that native speakers of a language did not need explicit instruction in its grammar (Kolln &
Hancock, 2005; Locke, 2005; Mulroy, 2004). Though practices in individual schools by indi-
vidual teachers varied greatly, this often meant that the elimination of decontextualized
formal grammar instruction from school curricula was not counterbalanced by alternative
systematic approaches to grammar (Kolln & Hancock, 2005; Mulroy 2004).
The education reform in Greece involved the authoring of the National Greek Curricu-
lum of 1982–1984, in which the stated objectives of language education included students
becoming capable users of the language and being exposed to written texts that are ‘repre-
sentative of the various forms of written communication’, with a provision for special atten-
tion to oral language (Charalambopoulos, 1999, n.p.). In addition, this reform, which
endorsed a structural approach to language, promoted a reconceptualization of the pre-
viously fragmented subject of Language Arts as a single entity. These objectives under-
pinned a series of textbooks for the elementary grades known as the My Language [H
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Γλώσσα μου] textbooks. These textbooks, which were adopted as required textbooks in
CG education in 1986 and remained in use until 2006, had a text-centered orientation,
with each text followed by drills on grammar, vocabulary and spelling exercises, as well
as writing prompts. According to Charalambopoulos (1999), the authors of this material
sought to move language education away from traditional grammar-centric approaches
and toward more scientifically informed practices:
the curricula and textbook authors tried, as they have stated, on the one hand to draw from the
Greek tradition and experience, avoiding negative elements and using all valuable ideas, and on
the other hand to utilize lessons from linguistics, psychology and education, as well as the rel-
evant experiences of other countries in these areas. (n. p.)
With regard to grammar, this new series of textbooks attempted the ‘organic inclusion
of grammar in an integrated language lesson’, expanded the examination of grammatical
phenomena to include a wider range of topics beyond parts of speech and conjugation,
and promoted the awareness of grammatical patterns through examples (Karantzola,
2000, n. p.). This objective was pursued with minimal use of grammatical metalanguage
and rules. As Karantzola notes, ‘the authors of the new textbooks believe that what is
needed is activation of the productive mechanism rather than transmission of knowledge
about language, since language demands mostly practical skill rather than knowledge’
(n. p.).
Charalambakis (2005) discusses a 1991 study conducted 17 years after the introduction
of the My Language textbooks to investigate the perceptions of teachers regarding literacy
instruction. The findings suggest that most study participants desired the reinstatement of
[presumably formal] grammar instruction and stated that they still used traditional
approaches to teaching grammar, despite the recommendations to the contrary of the
national curriculum and of the textbooks. In addition, teachers continued to conceive of
grammar as morphology and phonology exclusively and many continued to struggle
with how to teach grammar, a finding consistent with those reported by Locke (2005)
and Kolln and Hancock (2005) for New Zealand and the USA, respectively.
Content analyses that sought to explore the underlying values these required textbooks
privilege and promote have praised them for endorsing ‘collaboration and mutual under-
standing’, for their spirit of ‘anti-authoritarianism’ and their ‘ample keenness to support
and encourage’ (Leontaki, 2008, p. 17). In addition, when compared with the language text-
books of the past, these books show a marked improvement in their representation of more
12 X. Hadjioannou et al.
flexible family and gender roles. However, Leontaki (2008) reports that several researchers
have also identified the presence of a hidden curriculum – one that:
.
illustrates a pessimistic stance toward it.
is a special form of the ‘standard,’ a standard outside of social and communicative situations; a
‘non-situated’ language. Everyone speaks in the same way; neither their social identity nor the
particular circumstances of communicative situations influence the structure, the vocabulary or
even the style (as cited in Leontaki, 2008, p. 14).
The next language curriculum reform after the language education overhaul of the
1980s came in 2003 when the Interdisciplinary Unitary Study Framework (Διαθɛματικό
Ενιαίο Πλαίσιο Σπουδών, IUSF) was introduced. According to the IUSF, which is effec-
tively the national curriculum currently implemented in Greece and the Republic of Cyprus,
the aims of language education are:
appropriateness of use; this approach, which was also a trademark of the previous curricu-
lum, incorporared an attempt at reversing long-established practices that privileged written
language (Mousena, 2010) and signalled a concerted effort for a fundamental methodologi-
cal shift in the teaching of Greek by promoting the Communicative Approach to First
Language Education (CAFLE). The CAFLE is informed by sociolinguistic and psycholin-
guistic research indicating that the ability to communicate effectively involves not only
phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic knowledge, but also knowledge of
the practices of language use in the learners’ linguistic community (Hymes 1971, 1974).
In other words, native speakers of a language are endowed with communicative compe-
tence, ‘that is, the capacity to modify and adjust their language in deference to the audience
and the social conventions and expectations regulating the interaction’ (Tsiplakou, Had-
jioannou, & Constantinou, 2006, p. 381).
It is also worth noting that the goals of language education as articulated in the IUSF
include an explicit reference to the recognition and appreciation of language variation,
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thus presumably suggesting legitimization of non-standard dialects and their study in edu-
cation. However, as Tsiplakou (2007a, 2007b) notes, despite this last objective, the curri-
culum still treats SG as the language of education (i.e. as both the target language and
the language of instruction), with no proviso for substantive treatment of non-standard var-
ieties or of stylistic/register variation. In the CG context, this translates as a formal exclu-
sion of the dialect from the learning process.
It is quite striking that the Cypriot national curricula for language (MOEC, 1981,
1994, which was effectively substituted by the Greek IUFS) followed the Greek ones
extremely closely in terms of content and methodology and, crucially, also in terms of
what is constructed as the target language (SMG). Ioannidou (2011) shows succinctly
that adhering to the Greek curricula and Greek language policies has been standard prac-
tice since Cypriot independence; thus, policy documents from the 1960s do not in any
way address particularities of the Cypriot linguistic context such as the existence of
two major community languages and the diglossic situation between Cypriot and SG,
but instead the focus is on the katharevousa-dimotiki debate, as in Greece. When the
Greek military junta (1967–1974) makes the teaching of katharevousa compulsory,
Greek Cypriot education follows suit; conversely, when dimotiki becomes the official
language of Greece (and of Greek education) in 1976, the Republic of Cyprus again
follows. Similarly, the 1981 and 1994 curricula, which, according to Ioannidou (2011),
differ only slightly in terms of relative emphasis in their rhetoric on ‘Greekness’ and
on Cyprus’ spiritual and national ties with Greece, adopt fully whatever changes in
content and methodology are proposed in the Greek curricula, together with their proble-
matic aspects and misconceptions, as discussed above. It is abundantly clear that the main
concern is alignment with Greek language and education policies; this ‘outward-looking’
stance, which has been a striking characteristic of Cypriot formal and informal language
and education policies up until the present, ultimately amounts to symbolic indexing of
unity with Greece.
Assessment in CG public education focuses primarily on proficiency in written SG.
Despite the curricular provision for engaging with a variety of genres, in formal assess-
ment literacy translates into the ability to produce long narratives and descriptions in
primary education and critical ‘essays’ in secondary education. These assessment texts
are often produced in response to teacher- or textbook-provided prompts during special
writing-time sessions, often following a series of lessons during which students have
read texts and participated in discussions on the topic of the prompt. Though in recent
years there has been some movement toward promoting genre literacy, the instruction
14 X. Hadjioannou et al.
prior to writing typically focuses mostly on the theme of the assessment text rather than
on genre-specific authoring techniques (Hadjioannou, 2008). Other assessment tools
include in-class written tests, which mostly focus on text comprehension, vocabulary
and grammar. In junior and senior high school these assessments make up the trimester
grade of each student in the Greek subject. The yearly grade also includes students’
scores on a final examination taken at the end of the year, which typically involves a
heavily weighted essay, comprehension questions on texts taught during the year and
some grammar and vocabulary items. The final examinations at the end of the final
year of senior high school also serve as university entrance examinations, on the basis
of which candidates are allocated positions in Cypriot and Greek public tertiary education
institutions.
Cyprus does not have high-stakes standardized testing for any subject or grade level.
However, the Cypriot education system does participate in the international assessment
initiatives of Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Trends in
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International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (NCES, 2007). Cyprus does not
take part in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is
managed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus, Cyprus’ appli-
cation for membership in the OECD has been repeatedly vetoed by Turkey, which has
precluded the Republic of Cyprus’ participation in several OECD programs (including
PISA) (MFA, 2010b).
the ensuing pluralism brought to the screens a number of programmes rather different from the
climate that Brundson (2000: 168) describes as “the public service ethos”, i.e., they were more
commercially oriented with regard to aesthetics, content and social perspectives. (Roussou,
2006, p. 90)
Current Issues in Language Planning 15
During the early years of media privatization, SMG programming dominated the
Cypriot airwaves as many of the new stations were connected to sister stations in Greece
and, therefore, directly imported programming from them. In 1997, the popularity of
Greek programming and the changing broadcast media terrain in the Republic of Cyprus
led to a rapid expansion of CG programming not only in volume but also in content
(Roussou, 2006) and eventually in range of material.
In the early post-privatization era, CG programming consisted mainly of comedies
grappling with topics such as urbanization and modernity, but later soap operas and
more ‘serious’ programs were added to the roster (Georgiou, 2010; Tsiplakou, 2003/in
press). Also, as the subject matter evolved to include more modern-day situations, the
antiquated CG of the old Cypriot sketches was abandoned in favor of more authentic
uses of contemporary CG (Georgiou, 2010; Tsiplakou 2003/in press; Tsiplakou & Had-
jioannou, 2010). However, Cypriot-produced news and informational programming still
uses SMG, in adherence to the CG community’s communication norms, which dictate
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the use of SMG in formal situations. Interestingly, as Pavlou (2004) explains, CG also
appears in such programming, particularly when excerpts from live interviews are broad-
cast or the program hosts make off-script comments. In general, the presence of CG in
such occasions is the result of inadvertent code-switching ‘occurring because the
speaker is unable to sustain discourse in the more acrolectal levels of the continuum’
(p. 106).
In her analysis of several post-privatization popular programs in CG, Roussou (2006)
argues that this programming has ‘been creating and expressing a new style of demotic
culture, which reflects the social transition of the country from postcolonial to late moder-
nity’ (p. 93), and wonders whether it also marks ‘a type of autochthonous cultural resistance
to the embraces of Europeanization and globalization’ (p. 89). Additionally, in her study of
young Greek Cypriots’ attitudes toward language, Tsiplakou (2003/in press, 2004) theo-
rizes that the reported positive attitudes of informants toward both CG and SMG (which
she takes to be a result of increased linguistic confidence due to the emergence of the pan-
cyprian koiné as an intermediate stage in a potentially ongoing process of diglossia resol-
ution) may be linked to the recent upsurge in the presence of CG in broadcast media.7
There are currently six television stations broadcasting in most of the entire area gov-
erned by the Republic of Cyprus as well as a number of local television stations, whose
range is limited to certain urban areas. The stations of national range feature Cypriot pro-
ductions, Greek programming procured from sister Greek media networks, as well as sig-
nificant programming produced in the USA and in Latin America. Interestingly, in a trend
that has evolved over the past decade, most of the programming that is not in Greek or
English is broadcast with voice-over in SMG. Though none of the TV stations in the
Republic of Cyprus are owned or openly controlled by specific political parties, sympathies
toward certain political orientations are frequently apparent both in programming choices
and in news programs. Beyond broadcast TV, there also are a few subscription-based TV
services (cable, satellite TV), which feature Cypriot stations, Greek stations, as well as
numerous other stations from around the world.
With regard to print media, Cyprus boasts two English-language newspapers and a host
of newspapers in Greek (see Table 3 for title numbers and circulation information). Most of
these newspapers have nation-wide distribution, whereas recent decades have also witnessed
the emergence of a number of mostly weekly local newspapers and periodicals. In these pub-
lications, SG is the predominant language. However, CG occasionally surfaces in the form of
humorous commentary or of quotations from spoken language. In Pavlou’s (2004) survey of
newspaper journalists, his informants verified these uses and asserted that they employed CG
16 X. Hadjioannou et al.
selectively, noting that they thought that more extensive use would potentially hinder readers
as CG is rarely written, and would be met with reproof by their audience.
In periodicals, especially popular ones, CG is considerably more visible, often reaching
the level of hybrid, code-mixed production (see, e.g. columns in the weekly City free list-
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ings journal for Nicosia). Even more so than the TV stations with national range, nationally
distributed newspapers have fairly explicit, though not readily admitted, associations with
specific political ideologies and Cypriot political parties, which may be expected to affect
the standard language-dialect interplay in these publications. However, major broadsheet
newspapers still only make sparse use of CG, mainly for satirical purposes.
Local literature has always existed, and it can even be said to be thriving to a certain
extent (Kehayoglou & Papaleontiou, 2010). In a trend that has grown in both production
and readership over the past couple of decades, local authors often write realistic and his-
torical fiction novels as well as memoirs in historical and contemporary Cypriot contexts.
Most of this work is written in SG, and some features occasional use of CG. Some of the
books are published by Greek publishing houses and are distributed both in Cyprus and in
Greece, whereas others are published and distributed locally, their publication often funded
by the authors themselves. The writing style and range of themes can, for the most part, be
traced to parallel trends in literary production in Greece. However, this is not always the
case (see, e.g. Georgiou, 2006; Georgiou & Kyriakou, 2010; Marangou, 2007 for
Cyprus-specific motifs and a concomitantly increased use of the dialect).8
It is significant that CG, in varying non-standardized written versions, thrives in elec-
tronic communication, notably electronic chat, weblogs and on facebook (Sophocleous
& Themistocleous, forthcoming; Themistocleous, 2009, forthcoming). In their examination
of the use of CG in internet chat and of the users’ attitudes toward such use, Themistocleous
(2009) and Sophocleous and Themistocleous (forthcoming) have found that CG is ubiqui-
tously present and that users have very positive attitudes toward the use of CG in this type of
computer-mediated discourse (cf. the discussion in Section 5).
on the island using the same type of visas. Notably, such visas are only made available to
the workers themselves and are not extended to their families. In addition, to disallow the
opportunity for attaining permanent resident status and naturalization, immigrant workers’
visas are only renewable for up to 5 years. As a result, the immigrant-worker communities
are highly transient and are not represented in education or in public fora in significant ways
(CYSTAT, 2008).
In the early 1990s, however, a new group of immigrants started arriving in Cyprus with
the intention of, and the legal grounds for, seeking permanent residency. These were the
Pontic (Black Sea) Greeks, members of a Greek minority from the former USSR (primarily
from Georgia), who, upon the demise of the former superpower, established connections
with Greece, were awarded Greek citizenship, and through that, were able to move to
Cyprus utilizing a long-standing agreement between Greece and the Republic of Cyprus.
Many of the Pontic Greeks who immigrated to Cyprus speak Russian as their home
language; many others speak Georgian, whereas other subgroups speak Pontic Greek or
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Turkish (or any combination of two or more of these languages; see Tsiplakou &
Georgi, 2008). Additionally, the members of this group have varying degrees of fluency
in SG. Unlike the temporary immigrant workers, most Pontic Greeks came to Cyprus
with their families with the intention of staying on the island for prolonged periods of
time. This immigrant group (and the languages spoken by them) is significantly more
visible in public life than were immigrant worker groups because of the sheer numbers
of the new group, their substantial culturally defining presence in specific urban regions,
as well as the participation of their children in public education. Furthermore, though the
languages of the Greek Pontic community are not represented in mainstream media,
Russian, which serves both as a home language for some and as lingua franca for most
other members of the community, is used in community-based periodicals and also has a
modest presence in a regional TV station serving Paphos, an urban area where many
Pontic Greeks live (see Figure 1). The linguistic profile of the Pontic Greek community,
the sociocultural impact of their presence in the Republic and the ways in which public
opinion and language policy respond to this presence are issues on which research is not
yet available.
Since Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, there has been an impressive increase
in the number of European immigrants who arrive on the island with diverse residency
objectives: young individuals, mostly from Bulgaria, Poland and Romania, come with
the intention of working in Cyprus for a few years and then returning to their home
countries; young families from the same countries come with the intention of long-term
stays; and retirees, mostly from Great Britain, use Cyprus as their retirement or winter resi-
dence. With the exception of English, which, as discussed in Section 4.2.1, has always held
a prominent position in the Republic of Cyprus, the languages of the other European immi-
grants have had a moderate impact on the Cypriot linguistic landscape: the presence of
immigrant children in the education system has increased the need for multicultural prac-
tices and second language acquisition support, but the languages themselves are not
visibly present either in the schools or in public life (Hadjioannou, 2006; Tsiplakou &
Georgi, 2008).
ties of the Greek Cypriot community with Greece. The major feature of language policy and
planning in the Republic of Cyprus is the absence of official policy-makers or relevant
organizations, parallelling the situation in Greece. Issues pertaining to (covert) language
policy and language planning are typically relegated to the Ministry of Education and
Culture, to the Parliament, to political pressure groups and, on occasion, to the courts of
law. Viewed from a theoretical perspective, the Cyprus situation epitomizes the complex-
ities inherent in attempts to model the thorny issues of language policy and planning
across communities (Ager, 2001; Bugarski, 1992; Calvet, 1998; Cooper, 1989; Kaplan &
Baldauf, 1997; Karyolemou, 2010; Spolsky, 2004).
Cyprus. The various rulers of Cyprus, for the most part, adopted a laissez-faire attitude
toward the language of the island’s natives. Attempts at altering the natives’ identity
were very infrequent and highly localized in small regions of the island. These intrusions
were related mostly to short-term bursts of localized forced religious conversion to
Roman Catholicism during the Lusignan reign (1191–1489) and to Islam during the
Ottoman period (1571–1878). These isolated, short-lived attempts were not particularly
successful, and variants of the Greek language continued to be spoken by the Greek Ortho-
dox Cypriots (Cobham, 1908; Jennings, 1993; Nikolaou-Konnari & Schabel, 2005; Papa-
dopoullos, 1965; Sant Cassia, 1986; Terkourafi, 2005; Wallace & Orphanides, 1990).
In 1878, Cyprus came under British rule as a result of the Convention of Istanbul,
according to which the island was to be leased by the British while still formally remaining
under the sovereignty of the Sultan. However, in 1914, after Turkey entered World War I on
the side of Germany, Britain annexed Cyprus and declared it a British Crown Colony in
1925 (Webb & Groom, 2009). Language policy in Cyprus during British rule (1878–
1960), particularly as this can be traced through educational policy, can be characterized
as ‘an elusive “adapted education” policy’ which was significantly influenced by ‘local con-
ditions’ (Persianis, 1996, p. 46).
Language policies in British colonies are commonly perceived as ardently anglicizing
in nature, tinged by racism and lack of respect for the indigenous populations, their
languages and their cultures. Although such perceptions are not unfounded, a closer exam-
ination of language policies in various British colonies reveals a process of century-long,
gradual, uneven evolution of policy characterized by significant variation across different
colonies and at different times; this situation has been engendered both by shifting
locale-specific sociohistorical contexts and by an apparent lack of a coherent and purposeful
policy plan on the part of colonial officials (Whitehead, 2005a, 2005b). Adding to this com-
plexity is the fact that ‘British imperial education policy was highly contended during the
colonial era and remains a contentious issue among many contemporary historians’, who
have offered ‘widely divergent interpretations… from contrasting ideological perspectives’
(Whitehead, 2005a, p. 315). Though this analysis is not necessarily shared by all scholars of
colonial educational policy, according to Evans (2002, 2008) and Pennycook (2002),
language policies in the various colonies were decisively influenced by variables such as
the ideological orientations of colonial administrators toward the natives under their rule,
parsimony considerations, the local desire for learning English, and sociopolitical events
that had the potential to instigate anticolonial sentiments in the local population. For
example, an anglicizing agenda became activated in Hong Kong during the governorship
Current Issues in Language Planning 19
of Sir John Pope Hennessy, an ardent proponent of English education, but, as Evans (2008)
explains, anglicization flourished because of ‘the demand that arose from certain sections of
the Chinese community, who increasingly came to see that proficiency in English opened
up the prospect of social and economic mobility in the colonial milieu’ (p. 51). Interestingly,
according to Evans, Hennessy’s pro-English stance was fuelled not only by his belief in the
superiority of the English language and culture, but also by ‘his desire to enhance the status
of the territory’s Chinese community’ (p. 52), and his understanding that ‘it would be more
economically viable to “train up” English-speaking Chinese youths to “discharge the duties
of clerks”’ (p. 55).
Pennycook (2002) points out that anglicizing policies were not the only means of pur-
suing the objective of enhancing British control over colonial states. Indeed,
the need for education to produce a new generation of colonial subjects, more able to partici-
pate in colonial capital as both producers and consumers, more willing to accept the conditions
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of foreign occupation, was to be found not so much through the provision of an education in
English, but rather through the far more widespread provision of education in vernacular
languages. (p. 16)
1. The uncertain political status of Cyprus within the British Empire for approximately
50 years.
2. The racist ideology of a considerable number of British colonial officials, including
High Commissioners and Governors.
3. The lack of sufficient contact between the administrators and the governed people.
4. The rural society and the lack of industrial production on the island.
5. The financial constraints, which were the result of the colonial policy of economic
self-sufficiency.
6. The strong social demand for education and its internal dynamic.
7. The specific sociohistorical context of Cyprus at the end of the nineteenth century. (p. 45)
The interplay of these variables during colonial rule in Cyprus brought about two dis-
tinct periods in educational and language policies: a period of relative laissez-faire (1878–
1931) and a period of centralization and attempts at control over school curricula, admin-
istration, finances and teaching practices on the part of the colonial government (1931–
1960) (Persianis, 1996, 2003).
20 X. Hadjioannou et al.
During the early years of British rule, the colonial administration had to govern a ter-
ritory that did not formally belong to the British Empire, which had fallen under British
rule without a preceding war with the local population, which already had two established
education systems (Greek and Turkish), and where the majority of the population was
Christian and had a European culture.9 Given this stable, already functional situation and
for reasons of parsimony,10 the colonial administration forwent the enactment of radical
anglicizing (as in Hong Kong and India) or pro-vernacular (as in Malaya) education
agendas. Instead, for the most part, the British rulers allowed the CG and CT communities
to manage their own language matters and their fledgling education systems. In effect, this
meant little cost to the colonial authorities, but it also progressively reinforced ties between
Cyprus’ two main communities and their perceived national centers. Therefore, the period
from 1878 to 1931 can be characterized as a time of relative laissez-faire, as British inter-
vention in the curricula and the school systems was minimal. During this time Cypriot edu-
cation was loosely ‘supervised’ by the Colonial Office Permanent Advisory Committee on
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native education, and the colonial government placed emphasis on primary education, dis-
couraged academic education and promoted industrial and agricultural training (Persianis,
1996, 2003).
In colonial Cyprus, schools were funded largely by the two major communities, and
schoolteachers were appointed by community administrations. Crucially, the colonial gov-
ernment treated the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities as religious rather than ethnic
communities, and each was therefore granted educational freedom under the Elementary
Education Act of 1870 (Persianis, 2003). As already mentioned, both communities had
long-established strong ties with their respective ‘motherlands’; Greek Cypriot schools in
particular were provided with free textbooks from Greece, Greek Cypriot teachers were
given pensions by the Greek government and Greek Cypriot secondary education graduates
were admitted to the University of Athens without examinations. Thus, knowledge of
English was not a prerequisite for higher education, which, in any case, was by-and-
large discouraged by the colonial government on practical grounds.
Similar to the exoticizing orientalist perceptions that heavily influenced pro-Indian
language policies in the early period of British colonialism in India (see Evans, 2002), it
appears that ‘romantic’, quasi-philhellenic discourses on the part of the colonial rulers
had a role in shaping a laissez-faire language policy in Cyprus. For example, Persianis
(2003) reports that in 1880
the Earl of Kimberley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, rejected a plan of the High Commis-
sioner of Cyprus, Sir R. Biddulph, ‘to make English a general vehicle of education’. He rec-
ommended that ‘considering the rich and varied literature of ancient Greece and the great
progress which modern Greece had made in its work of education since the war of indepen-
dence, […] Greek […] affords ample means not only for an ordinary education but for the
attainment of a high degree of mental culture.’ (p. 356)
The reported flourishing of Hellenika Grammata (‘Greek letters’) in Cyprus before and
during the colonial period (Myrianthopoulos, 1946; Persianis 1966, 1978, 1994) may be
seen as the outcome of a constellation of factors, prominent among which are the British
laissez-faire policy and the promotion of a Hellenizing agenda by the Cypriot Orthodox
Church (see Gregoriou, 2004 for a critique).
The period of laissez faire in language policy ended in 1931 in response to (a) the
increased financial and political interests of Great Britain in the south-east Mediterranean
and the declaration of Cyprus as a British Crown Colony in 1925, which warranted the
Current Issues in Language Planning 21
adoption of more active policies; and (b) the mounting agitation of Greek Cypriots over
their desire for an end to colonialism and instead union (enosis) with Greece, which culmi-
nated in a massive uprising in 1931. These conditions led the colonial administration to
reassess their previous policy stance of low interference, deeming that it had contributed
to Cypriots’ mounting desire for further educational opportunities and to galvanizing the
Greek Cypriots’ Greek identity.
The colonial government’s response ushered in a policy period of ‘planned cultural and
educational lending’ whose major thrust was to orient Greek and Turkish Cypriots away
from their perceived ethnic centers and toward ‘a higher conception of their responsibilities
as Cypriots and of the position of Cyprus as part of the British Empire’ (Cyprus Governor
Sir H. Richmond Palmer as quoted in Persianis, 1996, p. 56). In addition, similar to the
objectives outlined in Macauley’s 1835 ‘Minute’, the new policies aimed at ‘creating a
new middle class which would be culturally dependent and politically supportive’
(p. 56), and which would become vested in the colonial government by holding adminis-
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trative posts.
Toward these ends, a series of steps were taken to centralize education and to control
school curricula. One such step was Governor H. Richmond Palmer’s (1933–1939) 1933
law decree making the governor ‘the central authority for all matters relating to elementary
education’. Consequently, the governor could control, approve, or veto ‘the books to be
used in schools and school libraries; the classification, examination, registration and pro-
motion of teachers […] the curriculum, syllabus, and courses of instruction to be followed
in schools’ (cited in Rappas, 2008, p. 372). Subsequent Education Laws designated English
a compulsory subject in the last two grades of elementary school and made the allocation of
grants to high schools conditional on the increase of English Language Teaching (ELT) and
the concomitant independence from ‘alien governments’, i.e. Greece and Turkey (Rappas
2008, p. 373). Finally, legislation imposed control on the suitability of Greek and
Turkish textbooks, and prohibited the raising of the Greek flag and the celebration of
Greek national holidays.
The colonial government also enacted several anglicizing policies beyond community-
based public education. First, provisions were made for more funds to be allocated to the
English School, which was taken over by the government and was reorganized to pursue
a curriculum aimed at preparing students for the London Matriculation Examinations. It
was specified that the English School’s mission would henceforth be to train civil servants
(Persianis, 1996). Second, in an effort to circumvent the community-run school systems, the
government established a series of multiracial ‘public-aided’ schools and a multiracial
Teacher Training College in which the medium of instruction was English. Lastly, the colo-
nial government rendered English proficiency a prerequisite for participation in the devel-
oping administrative and professional structure of Cyprus: success in English language
examinations was required for the recruitment and promotion of teachers and for employ-
ment in the civil service, and British qualifications were ‘indispensable by law for the legal
profession’ and strongly endorsed for doctors and dentists (Persianis, 1996, p. 58).
It also seems that an anglicizing agenda underlay plans for establishing a British Uni-
versity in Cyprus (or, possibly, in Palestine). Arthur Mayhew, then chief education advisor
to the Secretary of State for the Colonies and joint-secretary of the Education Advisory
Committee, who was also involved in the shaping of the Education Laws discussed
above, envisaged a teacher-training college as an essential part of the prospective British
University, and recommended courses in English Literature and Language, History,
Geography, Economics and Social Science, suggesting that such courses ‘would play an
important part in the formation of a sounder opinion and would give […] an opportunity
22 X. Hadjioannou et al.
for popularising British culture and traditions’ (quoted in Persianis 2003, p. 364). Governor
Palmer anticipated that a British University ‘might go far to solve the Cyprus problem not
only educationally but politically’ (quoted in Persianis 2003, p. 359). These plans were
soon abandoned for practical reasons, not least because of the advent of World War II (see
Persianis, 2003 for detailed discussion). In 1949 the proposal for a (British-run) teacher-train-
ing college again met with strong opposition from the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus and
was abandoned in favor of providing scholarships to British Universities.
During the years of the anti-colonial struggle (1955–1959), Greek Cypriot students
refused to attend English classes as a means of protest against colonial rule; in response,
418 out of 499 primary schools and all state high schools were closed by the colonial auth-
orities (Karyolemou, 2001a, p. 44). The year 1960 saw the end of the colonial period and
the official abolition of English in elementary education.
In general, the various centralizing and pro-English policies enforced in Cyprus during
the colonial era are in many ways reminiscent of tactics employed in other colonies, such as:
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(a) the attempt to control locally run schools in Hong Kong in order to counter nation-
alist, revolutionary ideas (Pennycook, 2002),
(b) the promotion of British education in an effort to secure Britain’s hold on Hong
Kong by ‘integrating the Chinese elite into the colonial establishment’ (Evans,
2008, p. 52), and
(c) the plan to create a local élite in India that would act as ‘cultural intermediaries
between the British and the masses’ (Evans, 2002, p. 262).
Despite these similarities, however, in Cyprus neither legislation nor practice involved
anglicization in the radical sense encountered in Hong Kong and India. This was most likely
the result of the colonial administration’s unwillingness and/or inability to impose such
measures and the Cypriots’ (particularly the Greek Cypriots’) opposition to them. Case
in point: when the colonial government imposed English as one compulsory subject
among many (while maintaining the teaching of the two major native languages) as a pre-
requisite for high schools receiving government funds, only one Greek Cypriot high school
agreed to increase its ELT hours to secure government funding (Karyolemou, 2001a).
Moreover, the Cypriots’ well-established perceptions of British racism and the already agi-
tated feelings of Greek Cypriots over the colonial government’s refusal to entertain their
desire for union with Greece decisively shaped public opinion and the proposed reforms
met with fervent resistance by the people and the Church (Gregoriou, 2004; Myrianthopou-
los, 1946; Rappas, 2008).
Although the colonial governments did not forcibly impose the teaching of English,
they provided financial and social incentives for learning the language (financial aid to
schools, the promise of a place in administration and in elite colonial circles). While it is
doubtful whether such incentives were adequate in ensuring English language competence
for a substantial part of the population (Rappas, 2008, pp. 386ff.), they may well have led to
the sociocultural construction of English as linguistic and social capital (Tsiplakou, 2009b)
within a framework of ‘liberal’, ‘cosmopolitan’ colonialism, as is suggested by recent
anthropological research (Bryant, 2004; Gregoriou, 2004; see also Constantinou, 2005).
judiciary systems inherited from colonial times, strong nationalist trends gravitating toward
the perceived national centers of each community and a CG majority that felt disdain mixed
with admiration over the English language and British civil government structures. The ten-
sions resulting from such complexities have heavily influenced language policy in the
Republic of Cyprus and are still reverberating in contemporary decisions. The events of
1974 and the subsequent de facto segregation of the two major communities of the
island, coupled with the prolongation of what has come to be known as the ‘Cyprus
issue’, have had major effects on formal and informal language policies in such areas as
the national curricula for language and the language of education, the attempt at standard-
ization of toponyms, the language(s) of administration and the courts, etc. In the following
sections we address each of these issues in turn.
In her analysis of language policies in the Republic of Cyprus, Karyolemou (2001a)
describes an overarching context of linguistic liberalism in the early years of the Republic,
which by the 1980s evolved into a context of legal intervention favoring the Greek
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language. However, Karyolemou notes, this apparent shift is not demonstrative of a core
change in aims and orientations but rather ‘can be better explained as an activation of an
already existing policy (at times retreating but never completely disappearing) by a set of
concrete legal measures’ (p. 41).
Karyolemou (2010) aptly notes that, considering that the constitution of Cyprus was put
together in 1959 and officialized in 1960, it can be argued to be one of the earliest cases of
recognition and establishment of linguistic rights in European history.
However, the enactment of these provisions did not last long, since as early as 1963
skirmishes between the Greek and Turkish communities of Cyprus led first to isolation,
as Turkish Cypriots retreated from government in 1964, and to complete geopolitical sep-
aration in 1974. In the Republic of Cyprus, which has continued to recognize the Consti-
tution of the Republic of Cyprus as its source of constitutional law, SMG and ST
continue to appear together on such formal government documents as government-issued
Identification Cards, passports, currency bills and government-issued forms. However,
the fact that the vast majority of Turkish Cypriots do not currently reside in the geographic
region controlled by the Republic of Cyprus has meant that Turkish ‘has attained a zero
degree of use within the Greek-Cypriot community since it no longer responds to any
real communicative need’ (Karyolemou, 2001a, p. 27). Most official and unofficial inter-
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actions take place in Greek, since they are rarely directed toward Turkish-speaking
Cypriots. Furthermore, the ‘doctrine of necessity’, adopted in 1964, ‘in the name of
public interest’, ‘allowed the bi-communal requirements of the Constitution to be over-
looked when compliance was impossible’ (Karoulla-Vrikki, 2009, p. 191).
The trend toward language regulation through legislative action peaked in the 1980s
with the extensive and highly controversial discussion in Parliament (October 1980–
January 1981, October–December 1986, July 1989) and in other realms of government
about the languages of instruction at the University of Cyprus. The debates were highly
politicized, and the protracted discussion brought to the fore ideological perspectives,
sociolinguistic stances and anxieties of policy-makers and of the public (Karyolemou,
2002, 2010). The right-of-center party DI.KO (Dimokratiko Komma, ‘Democratic Party’)
argued equivocally for a Greek-only university, while the right- and left-wing parties, DI.
SY. (Dimokratikos Synagermos, ‘Democratic Rally’) and A.K.E.L. (Anorthotiko Komma
Ergazomenou Laou, ‘Progressive Party for the Working People’), respectively, both
argued in favor of Greek and Turkish, the two official languages of the Republic of
Cyprus. The argument for three official languages, Greek, Turkish and English, as pre-
sented by some legislators, hinged on the importance of English as a lingua franca, as
the language of academic discourse and as a means of allowing Turkish Cypriot students
to study at the University of Cyprus. Those arguing for Greek and Turkish expressed the
fear that English, which was constructed as unquestionably dominant on the island,
would supplant Greek, which was, in their view, already ‘endangered’ in Cyprus. The
latter prevailed (Karyolemou, 2002). The final decision, which was reached in 1989, estab-
lished Greek and Turkish as official languages, setting English aside (‘On the University’,
Law 144/1989; see also Karyolemou, 2001a; Karoulla-Vrikki, 2001). Given the geopoliti-
cal separation of the two communities, this decision has in effect excluded Turkish, essen-
tially establishing a monolingual institution.
Karyolemou (2010) sees this as one of the many instances of ‘linguistic protectionism’
in favor of Greek, which appears to be a trademark of policies in the 1980s and during a
large part of the 1990s in Cyprus (p. 251). This trend was made manifest in other
aspects of enacted or proposed legislature; namely, in legislation regarding the language
of the courts, street names, driving licenses, public signs, toponyms, etc., as well as in
the national curricula for language and surrounding discourses (on which see Section 4.2.2).
The language policies pertaining to the presence of English in the judiciary constituted a
considerably more complex matter. The use of English as the official language of the legal
system for decades after Cyprus’ independence, albeit in violation of constitutional
Current Issues in Language Planning 25
provisions, was facilitated by practical concerns and was endowed with legal substance
through the ‘doctrine of necessity’. Laws and archives inherited from colonial times
were in English and lawyers and judges were trained in England. In practice, this meant
that principally Greek-speaking judges and advocates used English to conduct legal pro-
ceedings involving principally Greek-speaking litigants, whose limited knowledge of
English often rendered them unable to understand the events of the trial (Karoulla-
Vrikki, 2001, 2002, 2009).
The Constitution provided for a five-year period during which the law was to be trans-
lated, though the target languages were not specified. However, the process of translating
the law was very slow, leading to consecutive extensions of the validity of the English
version of the law (‘On Laws and Courts (text and process)’, Law 51/1965). In a move
that marked a shift toward the legal regulation of language matters, the Parliament of Repre-
sentatives discussed and adopted a motion for translating Cyprus Law into Greek in 1988
(‘On the Official Languages of the Republic’, Law 67/1988). Eventually, after numerous
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delays and repeated legislative action by the Parliament, the Greek translation of the
laws was adopted in 1996 – i.e. 36 years after Article 3 Section 4 of the Constitution estab-
lished Greek and Turkish as the languages of the judiciary (Karoulla-Vrikki, 2001; Karyo-
lemou, 2001a; Tsiplakou, 2009b). Research indicates that the long process of translating,
confirming, regularizing and finalizing the translation of Cyprus law into Greek is intri-
cately connected to ambivalent linguistic attitudes within the Republic (also made manifest,
for example, during the discussion over the language(s) of instruction at the University of
Cyprus) and has had significant implications for all attempts at language policy-making in
the polity.
A major reason for the delay was the fact that Cyprus law is based on English Common
Law, while the Greek civil code displays some French but mostly German influences
(Hatzis, 2002). The differences between the two systems have hindered the translation
process significantly, also resulting in numerous translation errors and neologisms (Kar-
oulla-Vrikki, 2002; Pavlou & Georgiou, 2010).11 Furthermore, the delay could be attributed
at least partly to the fact that there was reluctance on the part of English-trained lawyers and
judges to relinquish the status and privilege afforded them by their professional training
abroad and their command of English (Karyolemou, 2010). It is also important to note
that the legislative attempts to abide by the constitution (‘On the Official Languages of
the Republic’, Law 67/1988) ultimately led to a series of decisively pro-Greek language
policy actions – i.e. the replacement of English by SMG in judicial proceedings and the
translation of the Law into SMG. These actions may be seen as part of an overarching ‘pro-
tectionist’ trend favoring Greek at the expense of Turkish, as no attempt has been made to
date to translate the laws of the Republic into its other official language.
Beyond the court system, English was used vestigially in various sectors of the civil
service for many years (Karoulla-Vrikki, 2009; Trudgill & Schreier, 2006), e.g. in forms,
reports and departmental archives in ministries, public hospitals, the Department of
Lands and Surveys, etc. Such practices were somewhat limited by a 1994 decision by
the Council of Ministers requiring that ‘official documents issued by all government depart-
ments and semi-government organizations should be issued in the official languages of the
Republic rather than in English’, and were further curtailed by the 1998 Law on the Official
Languages of the Republic (Karoulla-Vrikki, 2009, p. 195). Ultimately, these regulations
have meant that English has been replaced by SMG and that English has remained in
use only in areas of the civil service where the use of an international language, in addition
to the official languages, makes sense for ‘obvious reasons’, e.g. in passports and driving
licenses (Karoulla-Vrikki, 2009, p. 195).12
26 X. Hadjioannou et al.
Following the practices of the public sector, until very recently there has been vestigial
use of English in many fields of private enterprise, including receipts, bank statements,
prescriptions (also those issued by state hospitals), business names, advertisements, etc.
(Karoulla-Vrikki, 2008, 2010, forthcoming). Two legislative attempts were launched in
1991 and 1996, respectively, proposing that names, advertisements and other signs dis-
played in public should be in one of the two national languages and that alternative
languages could be used only secondarily. Though neither proposal was voted into law,
according to Karoulla-Vrikki (2009) a series of decisions of the Ministers’ Cabinet and
of various ministry departments required the use of Greek in various aspects of business
and industry, such as restaurant menus, used car manuals, medicine package inserts,
product descriptions, etc. These attempts, which appear to have been feeding off a
perceived ‘crisis’ of the Greek language in Cyprus (Christodoulou, 1993; Papapavlou,
2001), sought to buttress the position of Greek against the potentially corrosive forces of
English and/or CG (Karyolemou, 2001b).
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study of Christian religious texts; the language of literacy was indebted to the archaic Greek
in which religious texts were written. Similarly, the schools of the budding CT community
were connected to the Mosque, and ‘courses were mainly based on rote learning of religious
psalms and on training in reading and writing’ in languages that differed greatly from the
spoken variety (p. 256; see also Section 6).
As discussed in Section 4.1, during the British rule (1878–1960), education in Cyprus
was not subjected to systematic anglicization. With the exception of intervention attempts
made by the colonial administration related to the content of instruction in history and to
adding English as a foreign language to the curriculum, the Greek and Turkish Cypriot
communities were, for the most part, allowed to manage their respective school systems,
in virtue of the fact that they were treated as religious rather than ethnic communities by
the colonial government. The education systems serving each community therefore
remained separate during the colonial period. In great part due to the two communities
establishing and maintaining strong ties with their respective ‘motherlands’, language cur-
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ricula and the content and objectives of language teaching largely reflected corresponding
objectives and concerns in Greece and Turkey.
With the formation of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960, the school systems of the two
major ethnic communities remained separate, as the Cyprus Constitution provided for
‘two parallel communal chambers’ managing the education system of each community
(Pashiardis, 2007, p. 203). Under this provision, both systems received public funding
while maintaining the right to shape the organization and the curricula of schools on a commu-
nal basis. […] The language of instruction was Katharevousa (the Standard Greek of the time)
for the Greek Cypriot system and Turkish for the Turkish Cypriot system, and the curricula
adopted by each educational system were closely matched to the curricula of the two
“mother nations.” Interestingly, neither of the two educational systems offered the language
of the other community as a subject. Instead the only other languages offered were English
and French. (Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1991 cited in Hadjioannou,
2006, p. 396; Persianis and Polyviou, 1992)
The Chamber-based system remained in effect only for a very short time as the inter-
communal clashes of 1963 led to the members of the Turkish Cypriot community retreating
from the public life of the Republic. ‘Following the separation [of the two communities] in
1965, all of the administrative functions of the Greek communal chamber were transferred
by law to a new ministry, the Ministry of Education’ (Pashiardis, 2007, p. 203).
In the years that followed, the CG education system continued to be very closely aligned
to the one in Greece, mirroring not only the curricula but also the language textbooks, which
up until 2011 were sent gratis from Greece14. This level of closeness, particularly in terms
of language policy, reflects the widespread sentiment among CGs that having a common
language with Greeks is paramount as ‘in modern day Cyprus SMG serves […] to dis-
tinguish GCs [Greek Cypriots] from the “other”, and […] as an identity marker that con-
structs kinship associations with Greece’ (Ioannidou & Sophocleous, 2010, p. 299).
Within this frame of reference, the CG education system instantaneously echoed all
major language policy decisions adopted in Greece over the years: In 1976, demotic
Greek (known at present as SMG), was formally adopted as the official language of edu-
cation following the language reform in Greece; in 1982, the Greek Parliament approved
the adoption of the single-accent (μονοτονικό ‘monotonic’) system, which eliminated a
number of accents from SMG with the aim of simplifying the written language.
The political decision in 1976 to replace the artificial and archaic form of Greek, kathar-
evousa, with a standard spoken variety, even if that variety was only spoken in the
28 X. Hadjioannou et al.
mainland, was of particular significance for the Cypriot context as it went some way toward
earning CG some legitimacy in the Cypriot school curriculum by allowing for the first time
the study of literary texts written in literary registers of the Greek Cypriot dialect. However,
these were treated as pieces of national literary heritage and not as vehicles for bi-dialectal
literacy. No formal attempt was ever made to introduce contemporary CG as a vehicle for
school literacy. Ministry of Education policies oscillated from tolerance toward the sporadic
use of CG orally in the classroom (for ‘psychological’ reasons) to outright prohibition due
to prescriptive attitudes toward the dialect and to the overarching trend of promoting SG as
the major means of solidifying a Hellenic ethnic identity.
Despite the negative policy climate regarding the use of CG in schools, a variety of
studies of language-in-use in classroom settings have shown that CG is ubiquitously
present and serves a range of communicative purposes, but that it is also associated with
various negative attitudes and stereotypes (Hadjioannou, 2008; Ioannidou, 2002; Tsipla-
kou, 2007a, 2007b). In a discourse-analytic study of a sixth-grade Greek Cypriot classroom,
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Hadjioannou (2008) found that both teachers and students code-switched between SMG
and CG to serve varying communication objectives and that the students ‘were aware of
their code-switching and felt competent in both dialects, but carried some negative stereo-
types regarding their home dialect’ (p. 275). Similarly, Ioannidou’s (2009a) analysis of eth-
nographic data suggests that the ‘choice of linguistic variety depends on the occasions of
communication, with the Standard associated with formality and appropriateness and the
domain of actual lessons, while the dialect is mostly associated with naturally occurring
talk and informality’ (p. 263). However, Ioannidou also found that non-compliance with
these expectations can have significant implications: students using CG were interrupted,
corrected and failed to be praised for substantially appropriate responses, which has a
strong negative impact on ‘students’ language attitudes, their self-perceptions and ulti-
mately their educational achievement’ (p. 265; see Tsiplakou, 2007b for similar findings).
The dynamics among the Greek, Turkish and English languages particular to the
Cypriot context are also visible in public education. Karoulla-Vrikki (2005), in a historical
analysis of language policy in public education in the Republic of Cyprus, traces oscillatory
movements between hellenization and cypriotization trends that seem to be in constant
dynamic opposition to each other. As Karoulla-Vrikki (2005) notes, policies in public
Greek Cypriot education during the early years of the Republic of Cyprus (1960–1974)
were characterized by an overt hellenization agenda. The national polarization that had pre-
ceded the formation of the Republic of Cyprus led the Communal Chambers managing each
of the two communal education systems (Greek and Turkish Cypriot) to language policies
which sought to emphasize and strengthen students’ connection to their community’s
‘ethnic center’ and to galvanize their sense of ethnic identity. In each system, the official
language of instruction was the standard language of each of the perceived ‘mother
nations’ and no policy provisions were ever put in place to encourage bilingualism (Had-
jioannou, 2006; Karyolemou, 2001a). In 1964, in a decision which, as Karyolemou (2001a)
notes, was ‘a logical outcome of a long-lasting policy in education, namely the de jure
confirmation of a de facto policy in educational matters’, the Greek Communal Chamber
announced the formal alignment of Greek Cypriot Education with Greece, and in 1965
transferred its educational responsibilities to the newly formed Ministry of Education
(later renamed Ministry of Education and Culture, MOEC). From that point on, in the
absence of specifically designated language policy agencies, the MOEC became a major
initiator and implementer of language policy in Greek Cypriot education.
During the period between 1960 and 1974, language textbooks were the same as those
used in Greece and Turkey respectively, and so were the curricula for literacy education (see
Current Issues in Language Planning 29
also Sections 2.4 and 3.1). During that period, the CG education system also mirrored the
decisions taken in Greece regarding the teaching of Ancient Greek as well as the adoption
of dimotiki/SMG to replace the purist and artificial katharevousa (see Section 2.1). English
continued to be taught as a foreign language in both education systems, though initially it
was pulled out of the elementary education curriculum of CG education. However, English
was reintroduced in the sixth grade (the last grade of CG elementary schools) as early as
1964 (Tsiplakou, 2009b).
After the 1974 war, which devastated the socioeconomic structures of the island and
brought a de facto geopolitical separation of the CG and CT communities, language policies
seemed to turn toward a cypriotization trajectory. According to Karoulla-Vrikki (2005),
during this period (1974–1993), language policy was influenced by:
.
struggle against the British, was not attainable (or even necessarily desirable);
. the adoption of dimotiki as the new standard.
Specifically, the espousal of a spoken variety of Greek as a standard (SMG) over an arti-
ficial, archaic variety (katharevousa) engendered conversations about the status of CG and
its place in education. Though a Greek ethnic identity was still definitely a focus, this new
trajectory resulted in MOEC policies that promoted the view of Cyprus as an independent
state, sponsored the compilation of an Anthology of Cypriot literature for school libraries,
and for the first time, legitimized the ‘parenthetical’ or ‘occasional’ use of CG in the
classroom.
In 1993, the socio-political context in the Republic of Cyprus precipitated another oscil-
lation toward hellenization in language policy (Karoulla-Vrikki, 2005). By that time, the
Republic of Cyprus had successfully exited the survival mode in which it had been
thrown after the war in 1974 and, as previously described, a number of regulatory initiatives
favoring the Greek language had already been undertaken by the Parliament of Represen-
tatives and other public institutions (Karyolemou, 2001a). Added to these initiatives was a
growing sense of unease over the perceived Greek language ‘crisis’ in Cyprus as well as
fears over the loss of the Greek Cypriots’ Greek ethnic identity as a result of extensive
prior contact with English as well as of globalization (Christodoulou, 1993; Papapavlou,
2001). Therefore, when a rightist government came to power and Cleri Angelidou, a con-
servative politician and former high-school teacher with training in classical philology, was
appointed as Minister of Education (1993–1997), language policies aiming at hellenization
were a natural consequence. Within the remit of a strong political rhetoric of ‘strengthening
our bonds with Greece on every level, political, economical and cultural’ (Mavratsas, 1998,
p. 54), Angelidou reinforced the existing connections with the Greek Ministry of Education
and Religious Affairs, engineered an increase in the hours of Ancient Greek language
instruction, organized professional development seminars for teachers in which the
beauty and eloquence of the Greek language were emphasized, and sent out memoranda
to schools exalting the Greek language (see also Karoulla-Vrikki, 2005).
After 1997, the intensity of hellenizing language policies by the MOEC subsided some-
what. However, ministry memoranda continued to remind students and teachers that ‘our
language, Greek, constitutes a crucial aspect of national capital and an essential indicator
of our identity’ (Hoplaros, Skotinos, & Erotokritou, 2004). In the absence of official
language-planning bodies, MOEC officials, school inspectors, school principals, etc. under-
took the role of informal language planners and enforcers of a covert language policy and of
30 X. Hadjioannou et al.
interpreting and implementing the national curricula, which remained indeterminate on the
place and role of linguistic variation in the school system. The agenda seemed to be, cov-
ertly yet univocally, to marginalize the use of the dialect, as it was purportedly unsuitable
for the cultivation of demanding aspects of (school) literacy (Ioannidou, 2009b; Tsiplakou,
2007a, 2007b); in contrast, the only form of language deemed appropriate for literacy was
SMG. As is shown in Ioannidou (2011) and Tsiplakou (2006b, 2007a, 2007b), a direct con-
sequence of this prescriptive attitude was that, by a rather circular logic, mere competence
in SMG was treated as equivalent to literacy learning, with pedagogically rather disastrous
consequences. The purported unsuitability of CG for the purposes of (school) literacy was
coupled with endorsement of the symbolic role of SG in forging strong links with the rest of
the Hellenic world (Ioannidou, 2009b; see also Pavlou, 2001).
Since the 1990s several linguists working as faculty at the then newly formed University of
Cyprus have become interested in the study of the CG dialect and have posed research ques-
tions as well as theoretical/methodological questions regarding the sociolonguistic status of
the dialect in the polis in general and in classrooms in particular.15 These works describe the
diglossic situation between SG and CG in the Greek Cypriot community, trace the extensive
presence of CG in classrooms and, particularly through the work by Papanicola (2010), Tsi-
plakou and Hadjioannou (2010) and Yiakoumetti (2006, 2007), recommend legitimizing
the presence of CG in the classroom and rendering it an object of explicit and systematic
study within the context of literacy education. This scholarly work has become part of
the course content of Language Arts programs at the University of Cyprus, as well as of
professional development courses offered to teachers through the university, thus unoffi-
cially impacting public education. More recently, understandings gained from this body
of work have indirectly influenced official language policy-making as well, as insights
from the aforementioned research have been incorporated into the new national curriculum
for language (MOEC, 2010a).
The new national curriculum for language, the first draft of which was completed in
June 2010, deserves some consideration because of its potential implications for language
policy. The curriculum, which was co-authored by one of the contributors to this mono-
graph, does not take any position with respect to assigning official language status to
either SG or CG. Rather, the curriculum focuses on deploying the naturalistic acquisition
of CG as a means of fostering metalinguistic knowledge and sociolinguistic awareness
with regard to the two varieties of Greek spoken on the island within a radical genre/critical
literacy perspective. The new curriculum states its critical literacy agenda at its outset:
This is the first Greek language curriculum that adopts a very explicit stance with regard
to standard language and dialect and geographical/socio-linguistic variation:
Current Issues in Language Planning 31
Students are expected to acquire a full overview of the structure of Standard Greek and of the
Cypriot Greek variety (phonetics and phonology, inflectional and derivational morphology,
syntax); […] to realize that various aspects of grammar perform specific language functions,
depending on genre and communicative situation […]; to know the basic structural simi-
larities between Standard and Cypriot Greek and to be able to identify elements from
other varieties/languages in hybrid, mixed or multilingual texts; to view the Cypriot
dialect as a variety which displays systematicity in its phonology, syntax and vocabulary;
to be able to analyze a range of hybrid texts produced through code-switching and language
alternation in a multilingual and multicultural society such as that of Cyprus. (MOEC, 2010a,
p. 2)
Not only does the dialect acquire ‘visibility’ within the language classroom, but it
also becomes an object of instruction. Contrastive analysis between CG and SG is
expected to foster higher levels of metalinguistic awareness, not only at the structural/
grammatical level, but, crucially, at the textual and communicative level. It is expected
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However, as reported by Hadjioannou (2006) and Tsiplakou and Georgi (2008), despite
a purported commitment to principles of multicultural education, language policies and
instructional praxis are unmistakably assimilative in nature and monolingual in scope.
The challenge posed by the presence of European and other nationals in public edu-
cation and in the polity at large is one that, at the current sociohistorical juncture, can no
longer be dealt with as a local issue with local solutions. Rather, European Union member-
ship has significant implications for language policy-making and policy implementation.
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European Union language policy entails a firm commitment to linguistic diversity and mul-
tilingualism (European Commission for Multilingualism, 2008). Therefore, the Republic of
Cyprus must reshape its language policies to protect and promote minority languages within
its domain, to support multicuturalism substantively and to promote language learning
directed toward multilingualism.16
Arguably more formal registers of the koiné display dense code-switching and code
mixing between CG and SG (Tsiplakou, 2009a, 2009c, 2010). These changes should
not, however, be seen as indications of moribundity of the dialect, but rather as natural pro-
cesses of language shift correlating with the novel sociolinguistic situation on the island
post-1974. In fact, the emergence of a structurally mixed Cypriot koiné, which is sociolin-
guistically juxtaposed to stigmatized basilectal sub-varieties and therefore acquires both
overt and covert prestige, may go a long way toward dialect maintenance in the face of
Current Issues in Language Planning 33
the decade-long ‘invasion’ of SG in education, the media, etc. It is therefore envisaged that
de-dialectization is a long way from taking place in Cyprus. In fact, the contemporary vital
presence of varying registers of CG in the media (Georgiou, 2010; Tsiplakou & Hadjioan-
nou, 2010) and on the internet (Sophocleous & Themistocleous, forthcoming; Themistocl-
eous, 2009, forthcoming), as well as the availability of a dictionary17 and a grammatical
description of the CG koiné following linguistic criteria,18 together with the on-going
national language curriculum reform, may be operative in reversing language shift and
arresting potential de-dialectization.19
ably the terminal speakers of this language. Morbidity has been expedited with the reloca-
tion to the south of the CMA-speaking population, who mostly lived in the village of
Kormakiti in the north of Cyprus pre-1974. Since 2002, Cypriot Arabic is one of the
UNESCO-designated severely endangered languages (UNESCO, 2009). The community
has expressed a wish for standardization and language maintenance (see Kermia Ztite,
2006), with which the MOEC has complied by putting together a committee of linguists
to work on the standardization and revival of Cypriot Arabic since 2008, following a rec-
ommendation of the Council of Europe (COE, 2006). The Committee has produced an
action plan for the codification and revitalization of CMA, which involves:
(a) a general description and a pre-assessment of the current state of CMA;
(b) an action plan for the revitalization of CMA;
(c) a proposal for the adoption of an alphabetical codification of CMA.
Whether these measures will help arrest morbidity unfortunately remains doubtful.
contrast to established practice in Greek Cypriot official language policy; cf. Floros, 2009,
2011a) for reasons of simplifying text flow. This does not imply any particular ideological
or political positioning of the author.
The constitutional document in effect in the northern part of Cyprus does not acknowledge
minority languages. A number of local and immigrant languages and varieties are unoffi-
cially ‘tolerated’, but do not appear in public life.
CMA, which, as mentioned in Section 2.2, is identified as one of the endangered
languages of the world, is spoken in Kormakitis/Koruçam (see map in Figure 1), the
only historically Maronite village that still has a CMA-speaking population. Though
most Maronites who lived in the Kormakitis area prior to 1974 moved to urban centers
of the south, approximately 130 individuals ‘have chosen to remain under Turkish admin-
istration’ (Karyolemou, 2010, p. 3). Since the opening of the borders in 2003, many Mar-
onites who currently reside in the southern part of Cyprus visit Kormakitis regularly, and,
having reclaimed their real estate property, have had their houses restored for use as second
or vacation homes. Recently, 27 Maronites who had moved to the area under the control of
the Republic of Cyprus post-1974 have been granted permission to move back to Korma-
kitis and reclaim their status as residents of the village (Kormakitis.net, 2011). Because of
increased traveling of individuals living in the southern part of the island to the Kormakitis
area, during the last few years Greek street signs, alongside the official Turkish ones, have
been installed in Kormakitis, but no public signs in CMA have been put up in the village. In
an attempt to revitalize CMA (see Section 5.2) and to solidify a connection between
Maronite youth and Kormakitis, annual language immersion camps for children aged
7–16 have ben held in the village since 2008 (Bielenberg & Constantinou, 2010).
CG and Armenian are almost completely out of use since 1974, when most Greek and
Armenian speakers fled to the south of Cyprus. CG is still spoken in the village of Rizokar-
paso/Dipkarpaz and surrounding areas, where a limited number of Greek Cypriots (520 in
1994 according to Brey, 1998; 343 in 2011 according to the Press and Information office
of the Republic of Cyprus; PIO, 2011) have remained after 1974. The immigrant population
that moved into Rizokarpaso as the local Greek Cypriots departed is often bilingual
(in Kurdish or Anatolian varieties of Turkish and CG). CG is also still the dominant language
for a small number of Turkish Cypriots in the Lurucina region and in Kaleburnu (Karpaz); the
older generation is almost exclusively Greek-speaking, whereas the younger people are
balanced bilinguals (Johanson & Demir, 2006; Ioannidou, 2009c; Kappler, 2010).
Another important, yet usually neglected, local minority language is Kurbetcha/Gur-
betcha, the language of the Cypriot Muslim Roma, or Gurbet (an Arabic term that
reached Romani through Turkish). Many of the Cypriot Muslim Roma have migrated
south after 2003, but there is still a small number of Roma living in the Morfou/Güzelyurt
and Famagusta/Mağusa districts; their precise number is unknown due to the mobility of the
Current Issues in Language Planning 35
group. Kurbetcha/Gurbetcha seems to be a kind of creole with mainly Romani lexicon and
CT grammar (Pehlivan, 2009, p. 150), but the language is still completely unexplored (see
Section 2.2).
The most important immigrant languages are Kurdish and Arabic; the latter is a Syrian
variety from the Antiocheia/Hatay region of Turkey; the exact number of speakers of either
of these languages is unknown. Other languages (i.e. other Arabic varieties, French,
Spanish, Persian, Turkic languages of the Caucasus and Central Asia and of Iran,
African languages and Urdu) are mostly spoken by such temporary migrants as workers
or students. In addition, the use of Russian and Rumanian is consistently increasing
because of the increasing presence of residents and workers from Eastern Europe,
especially in the Keryneia/Girne area.
English is still widely used in interethnic communication and in tourism. Native speak-
ers of English residing permanently in the northern part of Cyprus may be found in the
Keryneia/Girne and Lapithos/Lapta areas; some villages (e.g. Karmi/Karaman) are
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According to Johanson and Demir (2006), unlike the situation in Turkey, where dialects
are typically stigmatized, in the northern part of Cyprus the emerging CT koiné carries quite
some prestige as it is ‘spoken, alongside ST, at various levels of public communication’ (p. 3),
36 X. Hadjioannou et al.
with them a large number of dialect varieties from central, southern, eastern and northern
Anatolia, as well as from the Balkans. Although recent numbers are not available (see
Section 6.5), it is assumed that immigrants from Turkey form the majority of the population
in the northern part of Cyprus. Immigrants tend to use their dialects within their own speech
communities, and may switch to ST when speaking to people from other regions. Moreover,
as was pointed out above, they use CT features when addressing Cypriots. Given the over-
whelming influence of immigrants in the society, Turkish Cypriots use their dialect more
and more in order to differentiate themselves from non-Cypriots as a means of creating/
defending identity (European Commission, 2004). Specific epithets are used to denote
pejoratively immigrant or even standard speech (e.g. the verb karasakallaşmak ‘to speak
like a karasakallı’, from karasakallı ‘black-bearded’ for ‘Anatolian [peasant]’), and new
slang forms (such as turist ‘tourist’, Amerikalı ‘American’, karşıyakalı ‘from the opposite
side’, mavro (Gr.) ‘black’, apaçi ‘Apache’) which serve to mark social and linguistic
dissociation from Turkish immigrants, have recently been coined.
The war in 1974 brought about significant population shifts and led to a radical differ-
entiation of the distribution of the population in the northern and southern parts of Cyprus,
Current Issues in Language Planning 37
as Greek Cypriots were forced to leave the northern part of Cyprus and Turkish Cypriots
from all over Cyprus moved to the areas under Turkish Cypriot control.
A population census conducted in 1960 by the Republic of Cyprus counted 104,320
Turkish Cypriots, constituting 18.2% of the population of Cyprus21 (European Commis-
sion, 2004). However, various sources report that a significant portion of this population
and their descendants do not currently reside in the northern part of Cyprus (Faiz, 2008):
beginning from the time of the intercommunal skirmishes of the 1960s, peaking in 1974,
and continuing well into the 1980s, significant numbers of Turkish Cypriots emigrated, pri-
marily to Great Britain and Australia, for economic and political reasons (Hatay, 2007; Issa,
2006; Robins & Aksoy, 2001). According to the European Commission (2004) ‘at least
36,000 Turkish Cypriots emigrated in the period 1975–1995, with the consequence that
within the occupied area the native Turkish Cypriots have been outnumbered by settlers’
(n. p.). However, in her analysis of the 2006 census conducted in the northern part of
Cyprus, Hatay (2007) suggests that claims of massive post-1974 immigration of Turkish
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Cypriots (some reports allege up to 57,000 outbound immigrants) are exaggerated and mis-
leading, and refutes claims that the ‘native’ Turkish Cypriot population is dwindling.
Another significant section of the current population of the northern part of Cyprus com-
prises persons who immigrated to Cyprus from Turkey after 1974.22 ‘Between 1975 and
1981, Turkey encouraged its own citizens to settle in northern Cyprus’ (International
Crisis Group, 2010, p. 2). Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot administration maintain that
this was in order to encourage economic development and render the northern part of
Cyprus self-sufficient, but the Greek Cypriot side asserts that the policy was aimed at altering
the demographic character of the area and at raising the proportion of the Turkish community
to the total population of Cyprus (European Commission, 2004; Hatay, 2007). This facilitated
migration policy resulted in a significant influx of Turkish immigrants ‘from various regions
of Anatolia, mostly from the southern coastal regions such as Mersin, Adana, and Antalya’
(Johanson & Demir, 2006, p. 3). Hatay (2007) reports that ‘immigrants who were part of this
policy received empty Greek Cypriot properties and citizenship in the Turkish Cypriot state
almost upon arrival’ (pp. 2–3), but notes that the allocation of property was discontinued after
1982 and that citizenship criteria were made more stringent in 1993.
The passage of time (and the birth of children to immigrant families), the absence of
comprehensive immigration records (particularly in the first few years after the war), the
immigrants’ acquisition of citizenship in the self-proclaimed state of the north and intermar-
riage between immigrants and ‘native’ Turkish Cypriots render determining the exact
numbers of Turkish immigrants impossible. According to the International Crisis Group
(2010), ‘perhaps half the estimated 300,000 residents of the Turkish Cypriot north were
either born in Turkey or are children of such settlers’ (p. 2).
The current demographic makeup of the northern part of Cyprus is unclear, as there
is significant variation among the demographic information reported in various sources.23
The most recent census in the north of Cyprus was conducted in 2006. The census included
items related to citizenship as well as items related to respondents’ and their parents’ place of
birth. However, it did not include questions about language. This was a de facto census but
‘information necessary for determining the de jure population was also compiled’ (Hatay,
2007, p. 26).24 Table 4 shows the population census results according to citizenship
(source: TRNC State Planning Organization/KKTC Devlet Planlama Örgütü; SPO, 2006):
However, similarly to past censuses and officially reported numbers whose trustworthi-
ness was challenged by various scholars and political stakeholders, the credibility of this
census has been seriously questioned. Hatay (2007) acknowledges that some under-count-
ing (particularly of immigrants) did occur, but notes that ‘the exact number of uncounted
38 X. Hadjioannou et al.
persons is not known’ (p. 27). Others, such as Muharrem Faiz, the Director of the Cyprus
Social and Economic Research Centre (Kıbrıs Toplumsal ve Ekonomik Araştırmalar
Merkezi, KADEM), which did poll research for Eurobarometer, offers considerably more
damning critiques: ‘30% of the population of the northern part of Cyprus was not included
in the 2006 census’ and ‘the de facto population and the de jure population definition were
not clear’ (Kanatlı, 2010, p. 3; cf. Faiz, 2008).
According to the census, 49.5% of the de facto population of the northern part of Cyprus
in 2006 consisted of individuals who the Turkish Cypriot administration did not consider as
citizens. Though this number also included college students as well as other persons who
were in Cyprus for short-term stay, presumably the majority consisted of immigrants. In
some areas, such as Keryneia/Girne or the inner (old) city of Nicosia/Lefkoşa (northern
part), the distribution is even more in favor of the immigrant population. Thus, according
to the 2006 census, 65% of the population in inner Nicosia are citizens of Turkey, 15% have
dual nationality and 25% are TRNC citizens (Yeni Kıbrıs Partisi (YKP), 2008).
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Interesting information may also be gauged from a recent survey by the Turkish Cypriot
Teachers’ Trade Union (KTÖS, 2008) regarding the composition of school classes. Accord-
ing to this survey, both parents of 34% of primary school students are citizens of the Republic
of Cyprus (which means that they must have been born in Cyprus); one of the parents of 9%
of the students is a citizen of the Republic of Cyprus, both parents of 19% of the students have
double (TRNC-Turkish) citizenship (which means that they have a Turkish background and
were granted the TRNC citizenship at a later stage), and the parents of 37% of the students are
citizens of the Republic of Turkey. In other words, the survey results show that more than half
of the students have a non-Cypriot background. In some cities the balance shifts even more
toward the non-Cypriot side (e.g. in Kyreneia/Girne 54.5% have only Turkish citizenship
and 10.1% have dual citizenship, i.e. TRNC-Turkish citizenship).
The population issue is particularly relevant for the linguistic profile of the north of
Cyprus. However, the general oscillation of demographic data and the contradictory state-
ments of government and opposition forces25 reflect the unreliability of population data as
well as the lack of official sources on the numbers of speakers of the various languages and
dialects of the area.26 Therefore, it is fair to say that the actual number of speakers of the
varieties mentioned in Section 6.2.3 (CT, Turkish dialects, local minority languages, immi-
grant languages) is not known.
The 2006 census, as others before it, did not deploy language as a criterion; therefore,
the only language-related information that can be drawn from it are inferences stemming
from the figures for citizenship. However, these figures provide rather poor information
about the actual speakers of CT or of other Turkish varieties since:
(1) the statistics about citizenship do not fully reflect the varieties used by the
population;
(2) no statistics are available about the regions of origin of the immigrants from
Turkey; such statistics would be important in order to establish the numbers of
speakers of the various Anatolian dialects; furthermore, a reported recent increase
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in immigration from Turkey and the subsequent granting of TRNC citizenships has
changed the population profile of the area and contributes to the lack of reliable data
about the demographic situation in the northern part of Cyprus.
6.3.1.1 Education system, foreign languages and attitudes toward dialects in education.
As in the Republic of Cyprus, education in the northern part of Cyprus is compulsory until
the age of 15. Basic compulsory education includes 5 years of primary school (ilkokul) and
3 years of secondary school (ortaokul). High-school education (lise) lasts 3–4 years,
depending on the type of school (MEC, 2005). Alternatively, there are state and private sec-
ondary colleges (kolej) which provide six-year instructional programs, their diploma being
equivalent to a lise diploma (Yaratan, 1998, p. 613). Access to colleges (e.g. the prestigious
Türk Maarif Koleji) formerly required an entrance examination, but that requirement was
waived in 2009.
The school curriculum of 1999 was reformed following an initiative of the left-wing
government in 2004, when the Ministry of Education and Culture introduced a new edu-
cation system. The main differences between the two curricula lie in their differential
foci – on ‘mainland Turkey’ in the former curriculum versus the inclusion of local
Cypriot culture in the curricula after 2004/2005 (see Section 6.3.3).
The language of instruction is ST in all schools, while in colleges the medium of instruc-
tion is English. CT was not acknowledged in the curriculum before 2004. New curricular
guidelines regarding CT are in deference to recommendations by Turkish Cypriot research-
ers that ‘particular attention has to be paid to the differences between the standard and the
dialect’ and that ‘the implementation of bidialectal programs could be useful for the North
Cyprus educational context’ (Pehlivan, in Schroeder & Strohmeier, 2006, p. 295; see also
Pehlivan & Adalıer, 2010, p. 394). According to the curriculum of the period between 2004
and 2009, the teacher is expected to place ‘emphasis on the active use of the Turkish
language and [must] continuously make efforts to develop the Cypriot Turkish culture’
(MEC, 2005, p. 8). The curriculum also includes a newly-established Turkish Cypriot Lit-
erature course (school year 2004/2005); one of the objectives of this course was to ‘contrib-
ute to the students’ ability to perceive the differences between CT and Turkish spoken in
40 X. Hadjioannou et al.
According to informants from the Teachers’ Trade Union (interviewed by the author in
December 2010), primary school education in English (grades 1–5) is problematic since the
teachers have no TEFL training. In 2005, the Ministry of Education and Culture introduced
a reform within the framework of the new education system according to which students
who reach a satisfactory level in Turkish language study by the end of the sixth grade
may opt into English-medium courses in subjects (called akademik dersler ‘academic
courses’) such as Mathematics, History, Science and Geography. This can result in a ‘hori-
zontal’ transition to both Turkish and English programs, depending on the abilities of each
individual student (MEC, 2005, pp. 16–17).
From the sixth grade onwards, pupils may choose either French or German as an elec-
tive course. According to the new curriculum (2005), it was planned to include ‘Greek
[Modern Greek], the language of the neighboring society, in the programs as an optional
subject from the 6th grade after pilot implementation in some schools whenever possible’
(MEC, 2005, p. 16).
Greek courses are also offered optionally in some universities, e.g. at the Cyprus Inter-
national University (Nicosia), which opened some of its courses to extramural students.
Since 2003 the KTÖS (the Teachers’ Trade Union) has been offering Greek language
courses, which are open to everyone; instructors usually come from the southern part of
the island. Private institutes also offer Greek courses, while some Turkish Cypriots go to
the southern part of Cyprus in order to take Greek courses, e.g. the courses of the School
of Greek Language at the University of Cyprus. In a survey among Turkish Cypriot Edu-
cation students at the Near East University, Pehlivan and Atamtürk (2006) found that atti-
tudes toward Greek language learning were generally positive, yet participants were
undecided as far as the Greek Cypriot community and culture were concerned (as
opposed to the rather negative attitude of Greek Cypriots toward Turkish; see Osam &
Ağazade, 2004).
The northern part of Cyprus hosts five universities: two in Nicosia (Near East Univer-
sity, Cyprus International University), one in Famagusta (Eastern Mediterranean Univer-
sity), one in Keryneia (Girne American University) and one in Lefke (European
University); moreover, it hosts branches of several Turkish universities. Three of the five
universities are private, while the Eastern Mediterranean University and the European
Current Issues in Language Planning 41
University are state-trust institutions. Students come from Cyprus, Turkey and other
countries. To accommodate students who do not know Turkish, the universities offer
courses to help students develop the requisite Turkish-language skills (e.g. the one-semester
compulsory course TUR 101 at the Cyprus International University, which offers two hours
of Turkish per week). The major language of instruction in all universities is English, except
in the departments of Turkish Language and Literature and the Schools of Education, Law
and (partly) Communication.
Informal education includes practical vocational schools, centers of vocational courses
for women in towns and villages, a number of private tutoring schools (dersane) and after-
school private tutoring sessions (Yaratan, 1998, p. 622).
6.3.1.2 Objectives and assessment. The new objectives of the 2005 education system
include the following two statements on language:
The child
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The planned objectives were intended to be implemented in the school years 2005–2008
for the second foreign language, whereas the introduction of optional courses in Modern
Greek had not been allocated a time frame (MEC, 2005, p. 49). According to representa-
tives of the Teachers’ Trade Union (interview with the author, December 2010) the objec-
tives have been implemented in the period 2005–2008; however, the additional foreign
language courses are currently (2010) offered only at the elective level. Greek courses
are offered in some schools in urban areas, but still only as electives.
Many science textbooks used in both primary and secondary education are still
imported from Turkey. Textbooks produced in Cyprus include:
. the Turkish language and Cyprus geography textbooks (Ülkemizi tanıyorum ‘I get to
know my country’);
. the textbooks for social sciences;
. the new history books and
. Turkish Cypriot Literature books.
The texts of the last two textbook categories have been designed to represent the
Cypriot situation as it was in 2004 under the left-wing government of Mehmet Ali Talat
(cf. 6.3.3).
It can be expected that the curricula and objectives are going to change in the near future
because of recent political changes (a right-wing government since April 2009, a right-wing
president since April 2010).27
6.3.1.3 History of language policies in the Turkish Cypriot Education System. During the
Ottoman period (1571–1878), education was primarily offered by religious institutions; the
two major religious communities (Muslims and Orthodox Christians) had separate
education systems and structures, and there were no inter-group relations in the domain
of education (Özerk, 2001, p. 256). Primary education was offered in the sıbyan
mektebi (school for young children, primary school), and it involved writing and Kur’an
42 X. Hadjioannou et al.
classes, whereas secondary education was provided by the medrese (theological school),
and, in later times, by the rüşdiye (Ottoman junior high school), where Turkish
(Ottoman), Arabic and Persian grammar were taught. The idadiye, the secondary
schools established at the end of the Ottoman period and the beginning of the British
rule, added English to their programs (Behçet, 1969; Pehlivan, forthcoming); in the
rüşdiye curricula English was not introduced until 1896 and French was offered as an elec-
tive (Özerk, 2001, p. 257). In the same year, Greek was introduced as an academic subject
in the rüşdiyes, whereas in 1902 the Turkish Cypriot School Board ‘decided to hire bilin-
gual (Turkish-Greek) teachers at the primary schools in areas where Greek was in use as
lingua franca’ (Özerk, 2001, p. 257). Arabic and Persian were also retained as electives
until the 1920s, when these subjects were abolished due to the influence of the Kemalist
language reforms. As explained in Section 4.1, the British retained and encouraged the
practice of having two separate school systems for Turkish and Greek Cypriot students,
which resulted in each of the two systems orienting itself toward the cultural and ethnic
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centers of Turkey and Greece, respectively. Similar to the situation in Greek Cypriot edu-
cation discussed in Section 4.2.2, Turkish Cypriot education after the 1930s was strongly
oriented toward Turkey; textbooks and teachers came from Turkey, and Greek courses
were abolished. However, English gained importance due to its role as the official
language of Cyprus as a British colony and was introduced in the schools as the language
of administration. Teachers with insufficient knowlegde of English often had to quit
service (Pehlivan, forthcoming; Weir, 1952). On the history of education between 1960
and 1974 see Section 6.3.1.1.
In addition to the Turkish press, there is a bi-weekly English newspaper, Cyprus Today,
and a weekly trilingual (Turkish, Greek, English) one, Cyprus Dialogue, founded by the
journalist Reşat Akar in 2004 after the opening of the borders.
Bayrak Radyo Televizyon Kurumu (‘Flag Radio Television Organization’, BRT), the
state television and radio organization, has two TV channels and seven radio stations.
One of the missions of BRT, according to the new television draft law (2010), is
to take measures to secure that broadcasting is made in an easily understandable language using
Turkish without violating its peculiarities and rules, and to contribute to the development and
enrichment of the language of education and science.
(Yayınların kolayca anlaşılabilecek bir dille yapılmasını sağlayıcı önlemleri almak, bunu yapar-
ken Türkçe’nin özellikleri ve kuralları bozulmadan kullanılmasına, çağdaş eğitim ve bilim dili
halinde gelişmesine ve zenginleşmesine katkı koymak [Section 2.4.3. of “Bayrak Radyo Tele-
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This means that the only variety used in BRT programs is ST (for details on language
policy practices in the media see Section 6.4.2). Apart from Turkish, news is broadcast daily
in Greek and English; weekly news is also available in Arabic, French, German and
Russian.
Apart from BRT, there are seven private TV channels; some make moderate use of CT
in a koinéized form, mostly in talk shows or debates. Additionally, the radio station Radyo
Mayıs, which belongs to the Teachers’ Trade Union, broadcasts a program in three
languages (Turkish, Greek and English) for 1.5 hours per week in cooperation with the
bi-communal Association for Historical Debate and Research (AHDR); the program
focuses mostly on history topics.
society’. The ways in which this development has recently been halted and reversed will be
discussed in Sections 6.4 and 6.5. The innovations proposed by the previous government
also involved a new ‘Turkish Cypriot Literature’ course with a textbook produced in
Cyprus; the course, which was designed for grades 9–11, was first taught in the school
year 2004–2005. According to Pehlivan (2007), the course was well received by both tea-
chers and students, although there was some disagreement regarding content, ideology and
instruction. In spite of the political changes in 2009, this course is still part of the
curriculum.
Concerning literature in other, essentially unrecognized, languages (e.g. such minority
languages as CMA, Kurbetcha/Gurbetcha or immigrant languages) there has been no offi-
cial or unofficial support whatsoever.
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(1) the alphabet reform, which involved a change from the Arabic-Ottoman script to
the Latin alphabet and
(2) corpus planning, which involved effecting ‘changes in the form of the language
itself (e.g. the words, the grammar, the orthography)’ (Haig, 2003, p. 121); signifi-
cantly, corpus planning was coupled with the campaigns for the purification of the
Turkish language and the ‘purging’ of Arabic and Persian lexical elements (Lewis,
1999).
Current Issues in Language Planning 45
The Turkish language reform exerted an immense influence on the sociocultural struc-
ture of Turkey. The alphabet reform was officially introduced in 1928, while the language
purification reforms began in 1932 with the foundation of the Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti
(Society for the Study of the Turkish Language), later called Türk Dil Kurumu (TDK),
since both tetkik and cemiyet are Arabic words. The reforms continued until the 1970s,
and, in certain circles, they are still ongoing; the TDK, the regular publisher of the period-
ical Türk Dili, is still the official institution for language and corpus planning in Turkey.
Although the reform could not be implemented exactly as it had been initially conceived
by the reformers and by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself, the Turkish language changed
drastically, and many of the committee’s suggestions on lexicon and terminology have
been widely accepted (Brendemoen, 1990; Heyd, 1954; Lewis, 1999).
Both aspects of the reform were very soon implemented in Cyprus. In 1930, two years
after the Turkish alphabet reform, a printing machine with the Latin alphabet was sent to the
editor of the Cypriot newspaper Söz as ‘a present by the Turkish government on the per-
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sonal orders of Kemal Atatürk’ (Azgın, 1998, p. 646). Söz, which had been founded in
1920, was thus the first Turkish Cypriot newspaper to publish in Latin characters as
early as 1931; other papers followed suit years later (Azgın, 1998, p. 646). Kızılyürek
and Gautier-Kızılyürek (2004) report that ‘the language [sic; i.e. alphabet] reform did not
reach the majority of Turkish Cypriots until the period following the Second World War’
because of the interruption in the publication of newspapers after 1936 (p. 44). The
authors attribute this interruption to the fact that many Cypriots could not read newspapers
in the new script. However, it seems that the slower spread of the new alphabet in Cyprus
was rather the result of the prohibitive new British Press Law and the lack of paper during
war years (Azgın, 1998) rather than of less effective educational activities regarding the
new alphabet compared with the efforts in Turkey. Apart from facilitating the introduction
of the new alphabet, the newspapers played a key role in the spread of language purifi-
cation. At present the vocabulary used by Cypriots in formal oral communication and in
writing does not differ essentially, as far as the effects of the language reform are concerned,
from the standard variety spoken and written in Turkey. Also, imported Turkish textbooks
and other school material, together with the presence of teachers from Turkey, have been
instrumental in the implementation of the reform on the island.
During British rule, Turkish Cypriots were generally bilingual (Turkish L1–Greek L2),
whereas bilingualism in Greek and Turkish among Greek Cypriots was only sporadic
(Kappler, 2010; Karyolemou, 2003). In the 1950s, Greek and Turkish nationalism and
the pressure of nationalist underground organizations such as EOKA (Εθνική Οργάνωσις
Kυπρίων Aγωνιστών ‘National Organization of Cypriot Fighters’) and TMT (Türk Muka-
vemet Teşkilatı ‘Turkish Resistance Organization’) respectively, led to diminished contact
between the two communities and reinforced resistance against the language of the ‘other’,
which from that point on became the ‘language of the enemy’. In the case of Turkish, the
infamous Vatandaş Türkçe Konuş! (‘Citizen, speak Turkish!’) campaign, which started in
1958, imposed the use of Turkish and the avoidance of Greek, and introduced a monetary
fine for every Greek word spoken (Kızılyürek & Gautier-Kızılyürek, 2004, p. 46). Other
outcomes of linguistic nationalism in the late 1950s were the beginnings of initiatives to
change Greek names of towns and villages to Turkish (Özerk, 2001, p. 258) and the edu-
cational mobilization of the Turkish Cypriot Youth Organization, who sometimes brutally
imposed Turkish language courses on (Muslim) speakers of Greek or on those whose
Turkish was considered insufficient (Kızılyürek & Gautier-Kızılyürek, 2004, p. 46).
After 1960, ‘asymmetrical bilingualism’ shifted to ‘zero bilingualism’ among Greeks and
46 X. Hadjioannou et al.
restricted bilingualism, confined to the older generation, among Turks (Karyolemou, 2001a,
p. 27; Özerk, 2001, p. 259; Yağcıoğlu, 2003).
The only verb permitted for statements from both sides is the neutral de- (‘say’).
An additional symptom of the tangled links between geopolitical ideology and language
policies is the guideline that journalists working in state television must not use the word
ada (island) when referring to the northern part of Cyprus (e.g. Cumhurbaşkanı yurda/
KKTC’ye döndü ‘the President came back to the country/to the TRNC’ (instead of ...
adaya döndü ‘... came back to the island’), and they are obliged to use Anavatan (‘Mother-
land’) when refering to Turkey.
To sum up, although there are no official language-planning agencies in the northern part
of Cyprus, it seems that a trend toward ‘turcification’ has emerged in the last two years. More-
over, the sole language of literacy and the only language used in the courts is ST.
. Because of the demographic shifts currently under way, Turkish immigrants are
increasingly felt as an overwhelming menacing majority, compelling Turkish
Current Issues in Language Planning 47
7. Conclusions
In this monograph an attempt has been made to provide a comprehensive account of
language policies and language planning in Cyprus. Language policies and planning are
usually extremely complex issues, depending, as they do, on a host of political, social
and cultural factors.
The Cyprus Constitution (1960) provides for a dual-language approach to language
matters in assigning official language status to Greek and Turkish, in deference to
Cyprus’ two main linguistic communities. Though this provision in isolation seems to
point to a bilingual society, the Constitution document as a whole established structures
and procedures pertaining to a society where mutual bilingualism was not required or
even promoted: citizens could conduct official business in the state language of their
choice, vote only for representatives of their own community and attend independent, com-
munity-based educational systems. These consitutional provisions in many ways reflect and
48 X. Hadjioannou et al.
solidify a centuries old status quo, based on which each community managed its own lin-
guistic (and other) affairs.
Since the de facto geopolitical separation of Cyprus’ two main communities, first in the
1960s and, even more decisively, in 1974, language policies and language planning in the
Republic and in the northern part of Cyprus have remained ultimately separate from one
another. Despite the separation, however, the trajectory and the ideological underpinnings of
activities directly or indirectly infuencing language matters exhibit notable parallels, such as
the levelling of subvarieties, koinéization and a partial restructuring of the functions of the natu-
rally acquired varieties of each community and the superposed standard languages; the essen-
tial absence of official language-planning agencies; a dynamic tension between cypriotizing
and outward-looking trends; finally, the wielding of language policy as a tool for connecting
with, or, more frequently, for dissociating from, other communities.
As discussed in Section 2, the naturally-acquired varieties are CG for Greek Cypriots
and CT for Turkish Cypriots. Though many dialects in both the Greek- and the Turkish-
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speaking worlds have become moribund or have significantly converged with the respective
standard languages, it appears that both CG and CT are thriving; this may well be because of
their status as koiné varieties at the expense of local sub-varieties, which have been subject
to levelling. Both koinés seem to be slowly acquiring the status of prestige varieties, poss-
ibly a combination of overt prestige vis-à-vis stigmatized basilectal sub-varities and of
covert prestige vis-à-vis the externally superposed standard languages (or, in the case of
CT, overt prestige vis-à-vis the dialects of Turkish immigrants). Whether these processes
of koinéization will eventually lead to diglossia resolution in both communities is still
unclear; it is certainly not to be expected that diglossia resolution will take place as a
result of any kind of political decision given the absence of concrete language policies
and, crucially, of identifiable and stable language policy agents in both communities.
The Cyprus Constitution does not include provisions for state language planning and
language policy agencies, and since neither of the two main communities has formed
such community-based bodies, the absence of official language policy-makers and of
language-planning organizations is a common feature of the two major communities of
the island. This absence is due to a host of factors, principal among them being the long
tradition of implicitly relegating language issues to the education systems, which were
kept separate and were community-based throughout the prolonged period of colonial
rule, concomitantly with a relatively non-interventionist colonial policy toward language
use on the island (with the brief exception of the quasi-centralizing and de-ethnicizing Edu-
cation Laws of the 1930s). The two community-based education systems have consistently
drawn upon the education systems of their respectively acknowledged ‘motherlands’,
Greece and Turkey, for pedagogical models, for ideological orientation, and for policies
regarding language use on the island. This lacuna has resulted in a strong orientation
toward the respective standard languages as vehicles of both literacy and national identity,
to the detriment of the status of the local varieties of Greek and Turkish spoken on the
island, at least as far as their written status and their visibility in education and literacy prac-
tices are concerned. The perpetuation of this situation is largely due to the events of 1974
and the still unresolved ‘Cyprus issue’.
That both communities still remain by and large ‘outward-looking’ in terms of their
language policies may well explain the absence of official language policy-making entities
on the island (or, indeed, the fact that the creation of such entities is not envisaged) and the
relegation of issues of (overt or covert) language planning, as they arise on occasion (e.g.
with respect to language(s) and varieties of literacy learning, dialect standardization, the
languages of the media, the languages of the law, the languages of the state universities,
Current Issues in Language Planning 49
etc.) to entities and individuals as varied as (officials of) the Ministry of Education, the Insti-
tute of Education, school inspectors, the members of occasional and ad hoc committees of
experts, academics at large, the Press and Information Office, journalists, Members of Par-
liament and, on occasion, the courts of law and individual citizens.
A significant parallel tension characterizing debates about language both in the area
controlled by the Republic of Cyprus and in the area under Turkish Cypriot administration
is the conflict between ‘cypriotizing’ trends and ‘outward-looking’ trends toward the com-
munities’ perceived national centers (hellenizing trends in the south and turcification trends
in the north). On a surface level, this means that cypriotization trends involve the endorse-
ment of a Cypriot identity as the principal one and a rather positive disposition toward the
Cypriot dialects, whereas ‘outward-looking’ trends in each community involve the endor-
sement of a primarily Greek or Turkish identity and the promotion and protection of the
standard languages from potential erosion. The conflict between these two trends has
fuelled several language-related debates, including the polemic regarding the standardiz-
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ation of toponyms in the Republic of Cyprus (see Section 4.2.1) and, in the north, the
tension between the dogma of sameness with mainland Turks and the desire to assert a
unique Cypriot identity, which is often expressed through the wielding of CT as a
marker of ‘Cypriotness’ and as a tool for distinguishing Turkish Cypriots from Turkish
immigrants (see Sections 6.4 and 6.5). However, as indicated by such cases as the pro-
tracted debate over the language(s) of instruction at the University of Cyprus, and the aban-
donment of English in the civil cervice in the Republic of Cyprus, the actors, processes, and
outcomes of the tension between ‘cypriotizing’ and ’outward-looking’ trends can be quite
varied, and conflicting idelogies may generate identical policies (Karyolemou, 2002, 2010;
Karoulla-Vrikki, 2009).
It will be interesting to see whether such recent developments as the influx of immi-
grants in both communities, the linguistic implications of globalization, the new curricular
reforms, financial developments and, crucially, any new developments toward the resol-
ution of the ‘Cyprus issue’, will result in a set of overtly stated and consistent language pol-
icies and language-planning measures, whether these will be Cyprus-centered or outward-
looking and what agents (other than government and education) will be involved in the
instantiation of such policies and aspects of language planning on the island.
Notes
1. After the ceasefire in 1974 and up until 2003, crossing the buffer zone established between the
area under the control of the Republic of Cyprus and the northern part of the island was uncom-
mon. Crossing over to the northern part of the island was highly restricted; it was allowed only
through special permission from the Turkish Cypriot administration. Public crossings have only
become possible since April 23, 2003, when, in a surprise move, the Turkish Cypriot adminis-
tration announced a relaxing of the restrictions over cross-travel. ‘This meant that people were
able to cross in both directions without the requirement for any special permission, as was the
case before, simply by showing their passports or identity cards’ (Şahin, 2011, p. 586).
2. The Cyprus Constitution (Articles 2 and 3) recognizes two communities (Greek and Turkish)
and three minority religious groups: the Maronites, who belong to the Eastern Catholic
Church; the Armenian Cypriots; and the Latins, who are Roman Catholics of European or
Levantine descent (Dietzel & Makrides, 2009; Government Web Portal, 2006; Hadjilyra,
2009; PIO, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c)). The identification of the three minorities as religious
groups rather than as national minorities/communities by the constitution was significant as it
meant that upon the formation of the Republic they were ‘compelled to choose to belong to
one of the two main and constitutionally equal communities’ (Varnava, 2010, p. 207). All
three minority religious groups opted through the Referendum of 1960 to join the Cypriot
Greek community politically.
50 X. Hadjioannou et al.
3. ‘Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of
the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent,
highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a
large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech
community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and
formal spoken purposes but is not used by any section of the community for ordinary conversa-
tion’ (Ferguson, 1959, p. 336). Ferguson terms the superposed variety ‘High’ (H) to denote its
higher prestige, and the set of naturally acquired, low-prestige varieties is termed ‘Low’ (L).
4. All quotations from documents originally in Greek or in Turkish are rendered into English by
the authors.
5. According to EUROSTAT 2006, 10.1% of 15-year-olds in the Republic of Cyprus attended
private schools.
6. The programs of study in a number of private schools fully mirror or partially parallel the cur-
ricula and course schedules of public schools.
7. Gerogiou (2010) shows very convincingly that, despite the current preponderance of CG in
sitcoms, its continued relative invisibility in other types of programs points to its construction
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as ‘non-serious’, i.e. as unsuitable for types of communication other than the ‘light’/comedic
one of the sitcom. This is the dominant view expressed by media producers/channel directors;
facets of the current mediascape, however, provide a more subtle and intriguing picture. Tsipla-
kou and Ioannidou (2010, September) discuss the use of hyperdialectal forms coupled with
code-switching and code-mixing between CG, SMG and English in the recent sitcom Aigia
Fouxia (‘The Fuchsia Goat’, Ant1 Cyprus, 2009–2010) and argue that extreme dialect styliza-
tion together with aberrant filmic techniques make for a postmodern, deconstructive take on
constructions of language and identity in Cyprus.
8. The excellent translation/adaptation into the Cypriot Greek koiné of Asterix in the Olympic
Games by linguist Loukia Taxitari (2007) merits special mention here. The author uses a
consistent, linguistically informed orthographic system which is very close to that of the
‘Syntychies’ (Συντυσ̌ιές) [sindiˈʃɛs] Project (see note 17) and the one in Tsiplakou, Coutsou-
gera and Pavlou (forthcoming).
9. In other colonies, such as India and Hong Kong, Christian proselytism and tensions between
Orientalism and Anglocentrism were key forces in determining language and education pol-
icies; see, e.g. Carnoy (1974), Phillipson (1992), Sweeting and Vickers (2005), Whitehead
(1988, 1995, 2005a, 2005b).
10. See Evans (2002) for an analysis of the impact of parsimony concerns on colonial education and
language policy.
11. Such neologisms can, surprisingly, also be found in the translations of EU documents produced
in Cyprus, despite the fact that translators have ample recourse to translations from Greece.
Floros (2011b) suggests that this is a ‘cypriotizing’ practice, an instance of covert language
policy, on par with similar practices in media and law translation (cf. Floros 2009, 2011a).
12. Court cases demanding the exclusive or privileged use of Greek on passports and driving
licences are discussed in detail in Karoulla-Vrikki (2010). A citizen of the Republic of
Cyprus, Ms. Thekla Kittou, sued the Republic in 1984 and again in 1988 and 1994 demanding
that she be issued (a) a drivers’ license in Greek and (b) a passport in Greek or in Greek with
English as a secondary language, in deference to her linguistic and national rights as a Greek. In
1985, to avoid taking the first case to trial, the Republic’s lawyer submitted to the court ‘a
drivers’ license in Greek, specially printed for the plaintiff’ (p. 265). The passport suits were
rejected in 1994 on the grounds that (a) passports do not fall under the constitutionally
derived obligation of the Republic to communicate with Greek-speaking citizens in Greek, as
they are ‘not addressed to Greeks’ and are intended for use outside the Republic (p. 267), (b)
no law of the Republic made explicit provisions regarding the language or format elements
of passports and (c) the use of English did not infringe upon Ms. Kittou’s legal rights.
Despite the rejection of the passport suit by the Supreme Court of the Republic, just days
after the judgment, the Cabinet of Ministers decided that identity information on passports,
drivers’ licenses and identification cards would be rendered in Greek for Cypriot Greeks and
in Turkish for Cypriot Turks, followed by transcriptions in the Latin alphabet. Karoulla-
Vrikki speculates that, given Ms. Kittou’s stated intent to pursue the matter further through
the European Court, this decision may have been precipitated by a desire to avoid potentially
Current Issues in Language Planning 51
negative implications for Cyprus’ then pending application for ascension into the European
Union.
13. It is interesting that other comic distortions of Greek Cypriot toponyms (e.g. the name of the
village of /apeˈʃa/, whose unfortunate standardized rendering is AΠAIΣIA, which coincides
orthographically with the word /aˈpesia/ ‘horrible’ in SMG) were not at the center of the con-
troversy. As Karyolemou (2010) aptly notes, the debate was centered around the distortion of
what are deemed salient phonetic variants in folk-linguistic perceptions of CG.
14. Beginning from the academic year 2011–2012 Greece discontinued the gratis dispatchment of
textbooks to the Cypriot public schools as part of the austerity measures enacted in response to
the economic crisis. The Republic of Cyprus was set to purchase the textbooks from Greece at a
discounted rate (Hasapopulos, 2011; MOEC, 2011b).
15. See, for example, Arvaniti (2010a), Charalambopoulos (1990), Hadjioannou (2006, 2008),
Ioannidou (2002, 2009a, 2009b), Karyolemou (2000a, 2000b), Moschonas (1996), Papanicola
(2010), Papanicola and Tsiplakou (2008), Papapavlou (1998), Papapavlou and Pavlou (2004,
2007), Pavlou and Papapavlou (2004), Tsiplakou (2003/in press, 2004, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b,
2009a), Tsiplakou et al. (2006, forthcoming), Tsiplakou and Hadjioannou (2010), Yiakoumetti,
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Andreou, one of the officers of the I speak CYPRIOT and I’m proud of it facebook group and the
creator of Γουικυπριακά [Wikicypriot], has gone as far as to compile the 185-page long Σύγρονη
Γραμματιτζ΄ή της Tζ΄υπραίιτζ΄ης Γρούσσας –A Contemporary Grammar of the Greekcypriot
Idiom [sic] (2009), which is heavily based on Hadjioannou (1999). Although the grammar
does not follow any recognizable linguistic principles and actively promotes as ‘genuine’
Cypriot Greek a rather inaccurate mélange of basilectal sub-varieties and registers, including
obsolete forms, it is indicative of the new-found interest in the dialect among its younger speakers,
the expression of which is facilitated by computer-mediated communication.
20. ‘Resmi dil Türkçe’dir.’ Constitution (Anayasa) of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
(TRNC), 15.11.1983, art. 2 (2). Article 9 of the Constitution includes the aforementioned
article under those which ‘cannot be changed and cannot be recommended to be changed’
(‘[…] değiştirilemez ve değiştirilmesi önerilemez’).
21. The 1960 population census, ‘the only census covering the whole population in the Republic of
Cyprus [...] counted 573,566 inhabitants, of which 442,138 were Greek Cypriots (77.1%),
104,320 Turkish Cypriots (18.2%) and 27,108 others (4.7%), mainly Armenians, Maronites,
Latins and British’ (European Commission, 2004, n. p.)
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22. The Republic of Cyprus treats all individuals who arrived in the northern part of Cyprus after
1974 as well as their descendants as illegal settlers.
23. Ilican (2011) reports that population estimates ‘range from 500,000 in Cyprus to 500,00 around
the world’ (p. 95) and notes that Turkish nationals ‘are thought to constitute up to 50%’ of the
population of the north (p. 97).
24. According to Hatay (2007), the 2006 census was designed as a single-day de facto census,
aiming to count every single person in the north part of Cyprus, except members of the
Turkish military.
25. During the recent visit (6.10.2010) to Cyprus of the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of
Turkey, Cemil Çiçek, the Turkish Cypriot Prime Minister İrsen Küçük could not reply to the
question how large the population in the northern part of Cyprus was. Çiçek questioned the
reliability of the official numbers (which oscillate between 250,000 and 300,000) and rec-
ommended a ‘serious state reform’ (Kanatlı, 2010, p. 1). The discussion was commented on
in detail, especially by the opposition press (see, e.g., Kıbrıs, 07.10.2010).
26. For this reason, the sources used in this chapter, with the exception of SPO (2006), are mostly
unpublished papers and surveys by agents whose political orientation is opposition-friendly.
27. After the most recent political changes history textbooks were modified (in August 2010) to
focus on more Turkey-oriented content and (Islamic) religion has been (re)-introduced as a com-
pulsory course in grades 4 and 5 (before 2009 religion courses were elective). The effects of
these changes on language policy need to be investigated.
28. The interview was conducted by the author. The informant also stated that the term Kıbrıslıtürk
(‘Cypriot Turk’), used until then in official as well as in informal oral communication, had been
substituted by the term Kıbrıs Türkü (‘Turk of Cyprus’) in BRT news broadcasting.
Notes on contributors
Dr Xenia Hadjioannou holds a bachelor degree in the Sciences of Education from the University of
Cyprus (1996), an M.Ed. in Elementary Education from the University of Florida (1998) and a Ph.D.
in Instruction and Curriculum with a specialization in Language Arts/Literacy, also from the Univer-
sity of Florida (2003). Currently, Dr Hadjioannou is assistant professor of Language and Literacy Edu-
cation at the Lehigh Valley Campus of Penn State University. Her research interests include classroom
discourse, language arts methodology, linguistic diversity in education and equity pedagogy. Her
work has appeared in various scholarly publications including the American Educational Research
Journal, the Journal of Early Education and Development and English Teaching: Practice and Cri-
tique.
Dr Stavroula Tsiplakou received her B.A. from the University of Athens in 1989; she holds an M.
Phil. in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has taught at the University of Hull in the UK
(1995–1998), at Simon Fraser University in Canada (1998–2001) and at the Department of Education
of the University of Cyprus (2001–2008). Currently, she is Academic co-ordinator of the Greek Lin-
guistics and Literature M.A. Program at the Open University of Cyprus. Her research areas include
syntax, sociolinguistics, language acquisition and literacy. She is a co-author of the forthcoming
Current Issues in Language Planning 53
Grammar of Contemporary Cypriot Greek (Lincom Europa) and a member of the committee for the
new National Curriculum for Language in Cyprus.
Dr Matthias Kappler received his B.A. in Turkish Language and Literature from the University ‘Ca’
Foscari’ in Venice and his Ph.D. in Turkology from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frank-
furt/Main. Prior to his appointment at the University of Cyprus in 2001, he taught at the University of
Venice and at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main. His research interests
include Balkan Turkology and Turkish influence on South-East European languages, language
contact between Turkish and Greek, Ottoman language and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Turkish literature in Greek characters (‘Karamanlidika’), Modern Greek Islamic Philology,
history of Greek-Ottoman grammarianism and languages and literatures in Cyprus. He is the author of
Turkish Language Contacts in South-Eastern Europe (2002) and Türkischsprachige Liebeslyrik in
griechisch-osmanischen Liedanthologien des 19. Jahrhunderts [Turkish Love Poetry in Ottoman-
Greek Poetry Anthologies of the 19th Century] (2002).
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64 X. Hadjioannou et al.
and [ɛ]
[bɐˈbɐs] [pɐˈpɐs] dad absence of voiced stops [b], [d], [g]/[ɟ]
[ɛˈbɾɔs] [ɛˈmbɾɔs] forward (unless prenasalized)
[mɐγɐˈzjɐ] [mɐxɐˈƷɐ] shops fronting of [z]
[ˈɐlɔ] [ˈɐl:ɔ] other consonant gemination
(frequently ‘spontaneous’,
depending on stress placement,
e.g. [stɐˈvrul:ɐ] ‘Stavroula’)
[ˈkupɐ] [ˈkuphɐ] cup
[pɔˈtɛ] [pɔˈthɛ] never gemination (aspiration) of voiceless
plosives
[ˈptɔsi] [ˈpthɔsi] fall gemination (aspiration) of voiceless
plosives in clusters
[ˈktiɾiɔ] [ˈxtiɾiɔ] building spirantization of voiceless plosives
in clusters
[ˈçɛɾi] [ˈ∫ɛɾin] hand word-final [n]
[ˈçɛɾjɐ] [ˈ∫ɛɾkɐ] hands Stop formation/‘hardening’ of [i]
before another vowel
[tɾɐˈγuði] [tɾɐˈuin] song intervocalic fricative elision
(subject to levelling)
[θɛɔˈɾɔ] I consider [θɔˈɾɔ]
[xɔˈɾɔ] I see [θ]/[x] allophony (subject to levelling)
[xɔˈɾ(ɐ)ɔ] [f ɔˈɾɔ]
[xɔˈɾɔ] I fit [f]/[x] allophony (subject to leveling)
[ɐˈ(ɲ)ɟɐ] [ɐˈndƷɐ] pots affrication of [ɟ] (subject to levelling)
a
In the Appendix we provide a narrow phonetic transcription of the Cypriot Greek data for the
purposes of accurate exposition; transcriptions in the main text are phonological, as accurate
phonetic description is not necessary for the data discussed there.
66 X. Hadjioannou et al.