Tracing the Greek Cypriot Dialect: From Marginality to Elevated Visibility

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. This anonymous, yet famous statement, popularized by linguist Max Weinreich, emphasizes the arbitrariness of the distinction between languages and dialects, drawing our attention towards the political processes behind the decision to codify a particular vernacular into formal language, while condemning other linguistic variants into the subcategory of either the dialect, or the idiom.

The mess of hope

The mother dies. Or maybe she kills herself. Or maybe she is killed. The father locks the two-year-old child in a room. Covers up the windows. The father believes that the child, deprived of language, will begin to speak the language of God.