The southern coastal village where I live is part of the island’s ethnically Greek-Cypriot community, so Greek is the primary language. Here, English is a secondary language that is taught in schools beginning in first grade. Just ten minutes southeast of my village, in the trendy, cosmopolitan, or culturally rich, city of Limassol, lives a large community of Russian immigrants whose first language is Russian. In the northern area of the island, the ethnically Turkish-Cypriot community and many Turkish immigrants speak—you guessed it!— Turkish as their primary language. Across the island, there are more and more immigrants from other countries, such as Syria, the Philippines, Nepal, the United Arab Emirates, and the Ukraine, just to name a few countries from which I’ve recently met immigrants, each bringing with them their own language and traditions.
