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Cypriot Greek (Greek: κυπριακή ελληνική locally [cipriaˈci elːiniˈci] or κυπριακά) is the variety of Modern Greek that is spoken by the majority of the Cypriot populace and Greek Cypriot diaspora.
It is reckoned written language first made its appearance in Cyprus in the 16th century BCE with the yet-to-be-deciphered Cypro-Minoan syllabary, an offshoot of Linear A "with some additional elements of hieroglyphic affiliation" that was the basis for the later Cypriot syllabary.
Nouns are given in their nominative case, with the genitive case supplied in parentheses when its stem differs from that of the nominative. (For some languages, especially Sanskrit, the basic stem is given in place of the nominative.) Verbs are given in their "dictionary form". The exact form given depends on the specific language:
The Cypriot script contains 56 signs. [3] Each sign generally stands for a syllable in the spoken language: e.g. ka, ke, ki, ko, ku. Hence, it is classified as a syllabic writing system. [4] Because each sign stands for an open syllable (CV) rather than a closed one (CVC), the Cypriot syllabary is also an 'open' syllabary. [3]
The grammar of Modern Greek, as spoken in present-day Greece and Cyprus, is essentially that of Demotic Greek, but it has also assimilated certain elements of Katharevousa, the archaic, learned variety of Greek imitating Classical Greek forms, which used to be the official language of Greece through much of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Eteocypriot is an extinct non-Indo-European language that was spoken in Cyprus by a non-Hellenic population during the Iron Age.The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to Eteocretan, both of which names are used by modern scholars to mean the non-Greek languages of those places. [2]
This page was last edited on 10 September 2023, at 17:51 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
Since the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Turkish is found almost exclusively in Northern Cyprus, which is home to approximately 300,000 native Turkish speakers (including varieties of Turkish other than Cypriot) as of 2016 and 1,400 speakers in the south as of 2013. [2]