Reclaim Culture: Reject Imperialism, Embrace Cyprus

I’ve been working on Cylingo since April 2024. It has honestly been the greatest honour of my life, one of those rare moments where a project feels like a dream that escaped your head and became real. We started with something simple: the words we grew up with, the phrases that carry the island’s humour, warmth, and stubbornness. We wanted to collect them, explain them, and give them back to people. Specially to young Cypriots who were never given permission to love their own voice.

But building Cylingo also exposed a quieter problem that not everyone refuses culture outright; many people reject it with a smile, with a joke, with a shrug. The hardest part hasn’t been the coding, the editing, the research, or the endless messages. The hardest part has been the embarrassment some people feel toward their own Cypriotness an embarrassment that doesn’t appear out of nowhere, but grows out of imperialism and insecurity.

You’ve probably felt it too: that instinct to look “proper,” to sound “educated,” to prove you belong to something bigger. And in Cyprus, that “bigger” is usually nationalism either Turkish nationalism or Greek nationalism. When that mindset takes over, Cyprus becomes a footnote. The island becomes a stage where everyone must perform someone else’s identity louder, cleaner, more acceptable while our own local culture is treated like background noise.

One of the most damaging messages both communities absorb is this: “There is no Cypriot culture.” Sometimes it’s said directly. Sometimes it’s implied through media, school attitudes, and everyday mockery. Sometimes it’s the way our dialect is portrayed like it’s something barbaric, comedic, or out right wrong. The goal is always similar, make the local feel small so the “centre” feels inevitable.

Let me be personal for a moment. Turkish Cypriots, especially, are often trained to believe that the way we speak is disgusting, too village like, too vulgar, too “wrong.” People are encouraged to feel that Cypriot speech makes them sound unintelligent. I’ve heard variations of the same sentence again and again: “It sounds unsophisticated.” “It sounds like a village.” “I feel dumber when I speak like that.”

If you’ve ever been a Turkish Cypriot student around Turkish students especially in universities you know exactly what I mean. The judgement isn’t always aggressive. Sometimes it’s just a raised eyebrow. Sometimes it’s laughter. Sometimes it’s “correcting” you as if you made a mistake. But the effect is the same: you start editing yourself. You start translating your own mouth into someone else’s standard.

A friend of ours once experienced something that stayed with me: a lawyer told him he should speak “proper Turkish,” not Cypriot. Now, at first glance, someone might argue that “professional language” matters. But here’s the point: in Cyprus, speaking with a dialect is normal. It is the norm. And in many places, regional speech and professionalism coexist just fine.

Would you say the same thing to a Scottish person? A Welsh person? A Geordie? An Irish person? Would you tell them to stop sounding like themselves if they want to be taken seriously especially in law, education, or public life? In most of the UK, that kind of comment would immediately sound like classism. Because it is. And in colonial histories, classism and imperialism often walk together.

This is how internalised imperialism works: it doesn’t only come from the oppressor shouting at you. It also comes from you learning to police yourself. It’s the voice that says, “Don’t sound like that.” “Don’t say that word.” “Don’t be that kind of Cypriot.”

And it doesn’t stay at the level of personal insecurity. It becomes structural. The majority population has the louder media machine. They have the TV, the newspapers, the institutions, the cultural authority. When someone in majority declares that your local variety shouldn’t exist or shouldn’t be treated as legitimate. It becomes pressure. It becomes a lesson: your difference is a defect.

For example, there have been public controversies where statements attributed to official language authorities dismiss the very idea of “Cypriot turkish” or “Cypriot speech” as something separate or meaningful. When that happens, it’s not “just language.” It’s identity being squeezed into someone else’s mould.

That’s why Cylingo matters to me. We’re not trying to freeze culture. We’re not pretending dialects are untouched by history. Cyprus is a multi-ethnic island, geographically separate, socially connected, and always changing. There may be a Green Line, but people still interact. Culture still moves.

What we want is simple: to observe how Cypriot speech changes, and to protect the space for it to change organically not only through pressure, shame, or forced assimilation. Because yes, the dialect adapts. Even without formal education in it, even with heavy exposure to standard Turkish, the island keeps producing its own rhythm and vocabulary.

You can hear it in words and habits that remain stubbornly ours: ole, napan, gancelli. You can see it in how new slang lands differently here, how phrases bend to island humour, how tone becomes meaning. You can even notice local variations north and south, village to village, family to family because Cyprus never had only one single voice.

And here’s something we forget too easily: every standard language was once a dialect. Standards don’t appear because they’re “smarter.” They appear because power chooses them, prints them, teaches them, and punishes everything else. So when someone asks, “Who decides what sounds intelligent?” the honest answer is: often, power does.

Culture is not only art. Culture is not only folklore. Culture is a survival system. Language, music, food, jokes, and local memory are tools a community uses to protect itself from being erased slowly, politely, “normally.” It has always been a form of resistance.

So yes, I’m saying it clearly: we must reclaim our culture. We should not be ashamed to speak it. We should not apologise for sounding Cypriot. If anything, we should recognise the charisma, softness, and humanity in our dialect the way it carries the island’s history in everyday sentences.

And I’ll go further: I genuinely believe the best Turkish dialect is Cypriot. Not because it’s “pure,” but because it’s alive because it’s ours, because it holds multiple worlds at once, because it survived empires and still speaks with a smile.

I won’t even get into the economic side culture tourism, local production, how identity can become sustainable income. That’s a different article. This one is about dignity.

If you’ve ever laughed at your own dialect to fit in, I’m not blaming you. I’m asking you to notice where that instinct comes from and to challenge it. If you’ve ever been corrected for sounding Cypriot, I’m asking you to correct them back: this is also language. This is also intelligent. This is also Cyprus.

Come join us at Cylingo. Even if you don’t contribute a single word, just refusing to be ashamed is already a form of resistance.