Cylingo Launches Digital Dictionary of Over 2,000 Shared Cypriot Words

Cylingo, a bicommunal online platform created by Doruk Ekingen and Ugurcan Karsili, has catalogued more than 2,000 words that appear identically in Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot dialects. The project began after the pair discovered a lack of a Cypriot language database when searching for a word that neither of them recognised. Using programming skills and AI tools, they built a searchable dictionary that verifies each entry to ensure it is unique to the island’s dialects, rather than borrowed from Standard Greek or Turkish. The initiative builds on earlier academic work that identified 3,425 common words but included broader language families. Linguists praise Cylingo for preserving a linguistic heritage that has been under‑recorded, especially for Turkish Cypriot speech, and for encouraging the use of the dialect in informal contexts.