Arabic Lexicon in Cypriot Languages between Asia Minor and Egypt: Phonetic, Ethnographical and Literary Approaches

The contact between the two major languages of Cyprus—especially Cypriot Greek—and Arabic varieties from Egypt and the Levant has not been studied extensively. The present contribution is an attempt to accommodate the fact that language contact occurs under various conditions and in various cultural contexts, analysing some direct Arabic loanwords in Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish from different perspectives. Without omitting the phonetic aspect, the analysis is based on a more ethnographical approach, which considers a word and its ‘history’ as the history of its cultural context. This principle has been extended to the literary (con)text, which is a fundamental vehicle in language contact and lexical borrowing. Specifically, some Arabic terms in Giorgos Filippou Pieridis’ novel Oi Vamvakades are pointed out and analysed. Future research could focus on Cypriot and Anatolian Turkish. While Cypriot Turkish received Arabic words mainly through the mediation of Cypriot Greek (obviously excluding the numerous Arabic words that passed through Persian into Ottoman), several Turkish varieties in Anatolia exhibit direct Arabic loans.