DIKO MP and President of the Education and Culture Committee of the Parliament Pavlos Mylonas criticised this year’s participation of Cyprus in the Venice Biennale for a statement found in its official press release.
According to Mylonas, the press release refers to a “Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish language”.
The particular section of the statement, which has drawn the attention of Mylonas, refers to a publication accompanying the exhibition.
It states that the publication “brings together a collection of historical, fictional, and analytical writings authored by the artists, each text appearing in English, Cypriot Greek, Cypriot Turkish, and Arabic.”
The English version refers to “Cypriot Greek” and “Cypriot Turkish”, while the Greek version of the press release refers to Greek Cypriot (ελληνοκυπριακά) and Turkish Cypriot (τουρκοκυπριακά), without any direct reference to ‘languages’.
Mylonas stated that this is “completely unacceptable”. According to him, “If the Ministry of Culture, whose purpose is to protect and promote our cultural heritage, our contact with our history and identity, can adopt such baseless terminology that does not exist in any way and is not supported by any literature on the matter.”
The DIKO MP requests the competent authority to inform him “whether the non-existent existence of Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish language is an official position of your Ministry.”
Dr Spyros Armostis, Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Cyprus, told in-cyprus that “glottonyms such as ‘Cypriot Greek’, ‘Cypriot Turkish’, ‘Canadian French’, ‘Moroccan Arabic’ etc. have a long-standing tradition of use in the international academic literature, as they are the proper scientific terms to refer to these language varieties”.
“It should be noted that these terms are neutral as to the social status of the varieties, i.e. they do not indicate whether the speakers of the varieties consider them to be languages, dialects, patois etc”, Armostis continued, “and in the case of the Greek rendering of the terms ‘Cypriot Greek’ and ‘Cypriot Turkish’, which are respectively ‘κυπριακή ελληνική’ and ‘κυπριακή τουρκική’, this neutrality of the terms applies – as it also applies to their rendering in the press release as “ελληνοκυπριακά” and “τουρκοκυπριακά” respectively, without any use of the term ‘language'”.
“To give an example, in the international scientific publications, the Arabic variety spoken in Kormakitis has been called ‘Cypriot Arabic’ (or « arabe chypriote » in French, ‘arabo cipriota’ in Italian etc.) for more than half a century now” he further noted.
“The fact that, in 2008, the Republic of Cyprus recognised Cypriot Arabic as a minority language did not change its international glottonym: linguists called it ‘Cypriot Arabic’ both when it was considered a dialect of Arabic and also after it was officially recognised as a language” he concluded.
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