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The story of the Greek Cypriot dialect is one of conquest by a bewildering array of invaders, many of whom helped create a rich linguistic tapestry that some now fear may well be wearing thin.

The future of this unique dialect was one of the themes of Thursday’s European Commission and University of Cyprus organised event on the Cypriot dialect, which was held to celebrate the European Day of Languages.

The audience was told at length about numerous conquerors who brought with them new words and languages. Migration from Anatolia and Mycenae in the Bronze Age introduced dialects of Greek. Much later, members of the Greek Achaeans arrived in waves, as did Assyrians, Egyptians and Persians.

Then, more than two thousand years ago, Rome annexed Cyprus. Rome was followed by the Byzantine Empire (the language of the Church) and endless Arab raids. (We still use ‘mashallah’ or what ‘God wishes, he grants’ from the Arabic to praise Allah for good things.) 

The Frankish Lusignan rule from the late 12th century until nearly the end of the 15th century continued the linguistic changes, much to the chagrin of Leontios Machairas, a mediaeval Cypriot historian. 

Using the dialect to write his Chronicle of the island, he wrote that when the Lusignans came, people “started learning Frankish and barbarised Roman and up until today we write in Frankish and Roman and people don’t know what we’re talking about.” 

The short Venetian rule, followed by 300 years of Ottoman control and then British rule all added extra layers of vocabulary and expression.

For example, ‘karkola’ for bed comes from the Italian ‘carriola’.

‘Imish’ comes from the Ottoman Empire. In Turkish it’s a grammatical construct designating disbelieved reported speech, but in Cypriot dialect ‘imish’ is used to show that someone said something we don’t believe.

And yet among the imports, we still have words from Homer. 

“The Cypriot dialect is an ancient language that even today keeps intact many words from Homer,” said dialect expert Michalis Pashiardis.

Pashiardis, 71, has written numerous poems and plays in the vernacular, has collaborated with magazines and newspapers and worked at CyBC on cultural programmes.

Inevitably, many of the audience at the University of Cyprus talk asked the panel of experts what they thought of Greeklish, the increasingly used portmanteau of English and Greek. 

Is it corrupting the dialect? Is it just a fad?

“It is an evolution of language which serves new needs,” linguist Marilena Karielogou said. 

“Whether or not a language is a language and not a dialect is a sociological and political issue. It has nothing to do with the language itself,” she said. 

Yet nostalgia certainly exists for the language of the village. The Aegean, the restaurant-cum-bookstore-cum-publishing house in Nicosia’s old city, is often packed with characters hankering for a time past, when people spoke a different dialect, less homogenous across the island, more archaic and with a richer vocabulary. 

Pashiardis is there most nights, while owner, Vassos Ptohopoulos, has written his own book in which the richness of the language of his home village in now occupied Yialousa features prominently.

“Do you remember when our grandparents used to sing some strange and beautiful songs they called amanedes? I remember my grandfather in the house’s garden, drinking and singing on his own,” the Aegean’s owner, Ptohopoulos, says in a book he wrote, on sale at his restaurant. 

Amanedes also featured at the University of Cyprus event. Terpandos, a band which solely uses ancient Greek instruments, explained that amanedes - Eastern laments - were originally Greek and that is why they were banned by the founder of the modern Turkish state, Kemal Ataturk. 

There is a direct link, they said, between the ancient Greek historian Herodotus tracing the use of amanedes in ancient Egypt and ancient Greek songs of lament. The point is controversial, however, and not universally accepted as historically valid. 

But to a boy, listening to his grandfather singing, “it was like a theatre show” Ptohopoulos said.

It’s a point which highlights the link between the Greek Cypriot dialect and its convoluted history. 

It’s so convoluted in fact that most Greek Cypriots use Turkish words without realising. The slang for food that’s gone off ‘pagiatiko’ is Turkish. Greek-sounding ‘sastismos’ for confusion and surprise is also Turkish, as is ‘kappajin’ for pot lids. 

Perhaps surprisingly, Pashiardis, who is more knowledgeable and intimately connected to the vernacular than many others, doesn’t care either way about words. 

“I’m neutral,” he says when I ask him whether he’s sad that many Cypriot words have been lost. “Some of them are getting replaced by their modern Greek counterparts. That’s simply how it goes.” 

Words lost to be replaced by modern Greek or Greeklish is neither good nor bad he said. “Language evolves.” 

Karielogou echoed his sentiment when she told Thursday’s audience that people attach an array of issues that are political and sociological onto language itself, when they are actually irrelevant. 

There is nothing wrong, she said, with using the vernacular for some purposes and common Greek for others – that phenomenon is widespread. 

But she admitted that the dialect crops up in more places than you’d think, citing a study that, while looking at the transcripts of the House of Representatives which are corrected to fit standard Modern Greek, found instances of the Cypriot dialect. 

But not all agreed with Karielogou’s pragmatic assessment of linguistic evolution. 

Hambis, the well-known wood carver who has illustrated traditional folktales in the vernacular, chose to speak exclusively in the vernacular.

“I will talk to you in the language I live and breathe, as it helps me express myself,” Hambis told the audience. 

He said that language is a tool for expression and can be used unexpectedly such as when giving a lecture in dialect which the norm dictates should be in Greek ‘proper’.

His unexpected use of dialect made me recall a personal memory when I came across the Cypriot dialect in what - through the ignorance of youth - I had thought an unlikely place. 

Lost in the Karpasia peninsula a few years ago, my father and I ended up at a Turkish Cypriot village: Kaleburnu in Turkish and Gallinoporni in Greek, or rather because this is a story about the Greek Cypriot dialect, Galloporni. 

The men in the coffeeshop were all in their fifties or older and chatting away even amongst themselves in the Greek Cypriot dialect. 

For my father, who grew up like Ptohopoulos in Yialousa which had its own version of the dialect, the sight and sounds of older Turkish Cypriot men using the dialect was no surprise. 

But it was a rural Cyprus back when those old men learned the dialect and life was very different. 

Ptohopoulos for example describes in his book on Yialousa how they used to bathe only once a week, knew the names and nicknames of insects by heart, “what beautiful Greek many old men spoke even though they weren’t educated.” 

My grandmother says, for example, that her heart hurts when she has a stomach ache. She speaks a different language to me. 

“If you were only ten years younger than me perhaps we would have a common language and we’d discuss things differently,” Pashiardis told me. 

As it happens, he is over 40 years older than me but the fact that the dialect changes shows that language, a living organism, can only move forwards.