About The Project

British-born Cypriot comedian Stevie Georgiou took a keen interest in our project and made a special video about it. Have a look!

In the press

Τhe Grenglish Project – Calling all Greek Cypriots in the UK!. Parikiaki, 15 June 2019.

Grenglish: The Cypriot Greek spoken outside of Cyprus. in-cyprus, 19 June 2019, by Stelios Marathovouniotis.

«Φισάδικο, Πολισμάνος, Μαρκέττα»: Η αργκό των Κυπρίων του εξωτερικού. Πολίτης, 20 June 2019.

Grenglish Project: Πρόσκληση προς τους Κύπριους της Αγγλίας. Φιλελεύθερος, 23 June 2019, by Stelios Marathovouniotis.

What is Grenglish?

Like many other community languages that were transplanted from their places of origin to the UK as a result of migration, Cypriot Greek developed in a unique way in the British capital, through the borrowing of English words and their incorporation into the Cypriot Greek grammatical system.

These words came to be collectively recognised as a new linguistic variety unique to the UK’s Cypriot Greek speakers. They were labelled by many as Grenglish (although other terms such as ‘Cypriot English’ are also used to describe them). Grenglish words include all sorts of everyday terms such as πάσον/pason ‘bus’, νόττης/nottis ‘naughty boy’ and νόττισσα/nottissa ‘naughty girl’, μουβάρω/muvaro ‘I move’ as well as place names like Φίσμπουρι Ππάρκ/Fishbury Park ‘Finsbury Park’. You can browse more examples here.

Grenglish was created by first-generation migrants, who had a limited command of English, and in many cases Grenglish words replaced native Greek words.

They were later adopted by second-generation members of the community, but some speakers assigned negative values to them often referring to them as Greek slang. Many speakers express their preference for the Standard Greek equivalents, for example λεωφορείον/leoforion instead of πάσον/pason for ‘bus’, which means that this unique lexical stock that is emblematic of the community’s linguistic history is facing the threat of disappearance as new generations of speakers tend to avoid them.

The Grenglish Project website

We want to capture as many Grenglish words as we can in a way that involves the community and creates impact through a permanent record of its linguistic history.

To this end, we ask all British Greek Cypriots to upload Grenglish material:

Words and their meaning

Photographs of things, places, events, activities that have something to do with Grenglish words

Stories that involve the use of Grenglish words in the UK, Cyprus or elsewhere

Any thoughts, comments or feelings about Grenglish words.

We invite everyone to contribute material between May and September 2019.

What happens next?

Once a post is moderated, it will appear in the contributions section of this website.

We will curate all your contributions and organise them in a free, searchable online Grenglish dictionary with definitions, example sentences and related images, plus stories and thoughts about each word. We aim to launch the online dictionary by the beginning of 2020.

We will also produce an illustrated Grenglish-Greek-English print dictionary in 2020, documenting all your contributions and additional Grenglish materials which we will collect through our research.

Updates about the online and print dictionaries as well as information about the launch events will be posted here.

Funding

The Grenglish Project is supported by Middlesex University (research funding in Arts and Creative Industries) and the School of Humanities of the University of Westminster.