Cylingo: a living record of Cyprus’ languages

A bicommunal digital project has documented more than 2,000 words shared by Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot dialects, while using games and AI to keep the island’s linguistic heritage alive Doruk Ekingen and Ugurcan Karsili grew up as childhood friends united by a shared infatuation for the island’s languages. Today that passion embodies their joint endeavour, Cylingo, a bicommunal digital platform dedicated to recording and preserving the linguistic wealth of the shared Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot dialects. Speaking to the Sunday Mail, Ekingen recalls that the project’s catalyst was when he and Karsili were conversing online, whereupon they came across a Cypriot word neither recognised. They scoured online yet their efforts were in vain, after which Karsili said he wished there was a Cypriot language database they could refer to in such cases. Ekingen’s reply was immediate: “I said why don’t we do it ourselves? Let’s create an online dictionary.” That conversation, in the years since, has blossomed into a research effort spanning over 2,000 words shared between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot dialects, with identical pronunciation and meaning that require no translation between the two. More than 2,000 shared words For Ekingen, an electrical engineering student who taught himself programming to build the platform, the figure is evidence of a linguistic intimacy that decades of partition have obscured. The idea had earlier roots, for in 2018 the two friends read an article in the Turkish Cypriot newspaper Ozgur Gazete, reporting that the ‘Turkish Language Organisation’ had restricted the use of some 180 Cypriot words in official media. The diktat struck them as absurd: “These were words we used every day,” Ekingen says. “We regarded them as part of who we are.” A year later, on the Cyprus Friendship Programme (CFP) in the United States, they conversed with Greek Cypriots and were impressed by the sheer quantity of words that carried across. “Expressions we thought were entirely our own turned out to be completely familiar to them,” Ekingen recalls. The project did not properly take shape until 2024, when the pair turned to their grandparents for source material. “In a single day we collected over a hundred words,” Ekingen says, the first entries in what would become Cylingo’s database. Their research draws on and extends earlier academic work, most notable of which being the ‘Common Dictionary of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot Dialects’, which identified at the time some 3,425 common words. A language shaped by centuries of contact The academics traced borrowings in both directions, from Old Turkish, Arabic and Persian roots on one side to ancient Greek, Byzantine Koine, Venetian and French roots on the other. Ekingen argues that figure requires a stricter filter than the team has applied to Cylingo. “The earlier tallies folded in words shared with Standard Greek and Standard Turkish,” he says, “rather than words unique to our two island dialects.” Cylingo’s team checks each submission to confirm it belongs distinctly to Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish before it is added. The asymmetry in documentation shaped how the project unfolded, as Cypriot Greek has been catalogued since the nineteenth century, while the first Turkish Cypriot dictionary did not appear until the 1980s, leaving the dialect comparatively under-recorded. Cypriot Greek and Turkish face different challenges Speaking to the Sunday Mail, Eftychios Kaimakkamis, who advises on Cypriot Greek linguistics, and who runs his own social media page, Rhomios, which frequently collaborates with Cylingo, says Cypriot Greek has no shortage of material. “Compared to other regional languages, it is quite well studied,” he says, though he notes much of the vocabulary holds obsolete words from the previous generation. “A language is not static, it naturally evolves as it takes on different vocabulary.” Institutionally, however, “standard modern Greek has significantly more representation as the official language in formal settings,” Kaimakkamis says. “Cyprus is diglossic, one variation is more socially acceptable than the other, depending on the setting, whether formal or informal.” Even so, he is optimistic on the dialect’s vitality. “Cypriot Greek is today, at its healthiest. You can find it in more settings, such as on podcasts or television, though the discourse is entirely dependent on it being in a casual context.” Turkish Cypriot poet and peace activist Halil Karapasaoglu Can schools help preserve the dialect? Asked whether Cyprus needs an institutional language authority, his opinion is that although “Cypriot Greek doesn’t require protection at present”, Cypriot Turkish, he cautions, is in a markedly different position. “It is more challenged in casual speech at present and more homogenised than Cypriot Greek,” he explains. “What needs ‘protection’ is Greek Cypriots themselves. Cypriot children are more comfortable speaking in the local vernacular, yet we structure education without integrating it or we treat it as incorrect.” Linguist Dr Spyros Armostis at the University of Cyprus shares the view that the dialect is in good health, but says its standing needs attention. “Actions must be taken towards destigmatising Cypriot Greek. This notion that it is inferior or less cultured than Standard Greek is a fallacy.” He points to the perennial school teachings as being part of the problem. “Within the curriculum, the education ministry acknowledges the dialect as an important part of our cultural heritage, but it does not deem it appropriate to be used in the classroom.” For Armostis, this is “not in line with scientific finds, we know from studies across the world that if the school makes use of the language or dialect students speak at home, they get to learn the target language significantly better.” Kaimakkis agrees, remarking that “the education system doesn’t take into account that Standard Greek is acquired by students in schools and media rather than with family and friends. This inadvertently harms the cultivation of linguistic aptitudes in standard Greek for students.” Armostis commends Cylingo as “an excellent initiative by enthusiasts”. “As a linguist, it is deeply refreshing to observe such a project out of pure love for Cyprus’ languages and dialects,” he says. Eventually approach 9,000 words According to an estimate from linguist Orhan Kabatas cited by the team, the shared vocabulary could eventually approach 9,000 words across a third volume, though that figure remains a projection of scope rather than a count of words already published. What the research keeps surfacing, Ekingen says, is the layered history of the island itself, carried inside ordinary words. He recalls one of his colleagues relaying that their grandparents, from Paphos, actually referred to the baked pasta dish known elsewhere as ‘makaronia tou fornou’ as ‘lasagna’, a trace most likely left by Venetian rule. On shared vocabulary in cuisine, one need only look to ‘anari’, ‘zivania’ and ‘molohiya’, all of which sit alongside terms borrowed from Latin, French, Arabic and Persian, as evidence of the successive civilisations that possessed Cyprus. For Turkish Cypriot poet and peace activist Halil Karapasaoglu, who writes regularly for Yeniduzen, such an illustrious history gives credence to defending the local dialect. “In school they imposed Standard Turkish on us, whenever I wrote in the Turkish Cypriot dialect it caused a stir, and others viewed it as improper. I regard it as my duty, as a form of anti-colonial resistance,” he declares. Karapasaoglu makes clear to distinguish between standard modern Turkish which “was itself shaped by republican Kemalism”, unlike Cypriot Turkish which “evolved out of an entirely different history”. He sees the effects across generations of the challenges facing the dialect, noting his “six-year-old daughter’s generation increasingly speak like mainland Turks”, an observation he regards as indicative of Cypriots “progressively losing our heritage”. “Language is an inextricable facet of our culture. Why should I be forced to translate to those who colonised us when I am simply expressing myself?” Beyond the dictionary itself, Cylingo has built some seven interactive games designed to help visitors practise using the dialects, four for Turkish Cypriot and three for Greek Cypriot. Alongside these, the platform offers pronunciation guides drawn from academic sources and a scientific paper on the phonetics of Cypriot Greek, with a parallel study on Turkish Cypriot developed by external experts. The team’s next undertaking is more ambitious still, an artificial intelligence tool intended to understand and correctly reproduce both Cypriot dialects. “There is very little digital material for the dialect,” Ekingen admits, “and general AI tools tend to confuse it with standard Greek or Turkish.” To address the issue, he has built a customised model trained on Cylingo’s sources and on authentic Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot texts he has managed to locate. “It’s a slow process,” he says, “because the underlying model has already absorbed so much from other dialects.” “I’m not uncritical of AI, but I believe it will play a significant role in how heritage is transmitted,” Ekingen says. The platform’s audience has revealed something its founders had not fully anticipated; the heaviest users tend to be from the older generations, drawn back to words that carry memories of villages and decades now passed. Karapasaoglu sees the same pull among the young, as “most people these days don’t really want to open a book or do library research, and Cylingo carries all the old languages.” “My generation did not pay attention to these things. [The founders] are incredibly young, and it gives me much hope for the future.” Under pressure of “assimilation”, he commends the team for wishing to “not forget their culture, returning to their original source material, to their society, to the dialect”. Kaimakkamis says the platform’s value goes beyond its original brief, as with many ventures whose destiny took a different root, “dictionaries don’t have a set-in-stone mission, they can accomplish and inspire much more than they originally intended.” Regardless of intention, he says the platform’s value “as a point of reference is immeasurable, and ultimately Cylingo is the first integrated platform to preserve and promote the island’s languages”. Ekingen is explicit that he does not want the platform to be “mistaken for a static dictionary or a purely academic exercise”. “Cylingo is crucially built to grow through public submission, as a living community project to preserve our history and heritage.” A language is more than its vocabulary On whether the dialect is being erased, Armostis offered a different reasoning, assuring that “linguistically speaking, Cypriot Greek is not being forgotten”. “A language is not merely the sum of its lexicon, which is constantly changing and evolving through the passage of time.” “What defines a language at its heart is its grammar, its structure.” “Even if words are borrowed from elsewhere, as long as the conjugation, the syntax or the phonology is maintained, the Cypriot dialect does in fact endure.”