2010/01/01 by Christiana Themistocleous · 1 citation
Computer Science · Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Digital Communication and Language #Multilingual Education and Policy #Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity #Variety (cybernetics) #Romanization #Orthography #Standard language #The Internet #Linguistics #Modern Greek #Psychology #Sociology #History #Computer science #Classics #Reading (process) #World Wide Web #Artificial intelligence
paper · doi:10.1093/wsr/wsq008
openalex publication_date 2010/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Cypriot Greek, a variety of Greek spoken in the island of Cyprus, is relatively distinct from Standard Greek in all linguistic domains. The regional variety does not have a standard, official orthography and it is rarely used for everyday written purposes. Following technological development and the emergence of Computer-mediated Communication, a Romanized version of written CG is now widely used in online text-based communication, among teenagers and young adults (Themistocleous, C. (2008), The use of Cypriot-Greek in synchronous computer-mediated communication (PhD thesis), University of Manchester). In this study, I present the innovative ways that Greek-Cypriots use Roman characters in an effort to represent features of their spoken language in their online writings. By analysing data obtained from channel #Cyprus of Internet Relay Chat, I demonstrate how the choice of writing in CG affects the ways that Roman characters are used. I argue that this practice is not just a response to technological constrains but it actually has a wider social significance.