The Dialect Once Marked ‘Wrong’ At School Now Has Its Own World First Award-Winning App
Effie Athanassiou was eleven years old, sitting at the dining table in her family’s home in Adelaide, when her father first told her that half the tonos were missing from her sentence. She did not understand, at the time, that the accents he was correcting, the ones her Greek school teacher would mark wrong the very next morning, belonged to a dialect nobody had ever properly taught outside the home. Two decades on, Athanassiou has built the thing that didn’t exist when she needed it. Cyprusays, the first mobile app dedicated to teaching Cypriot Greek, has just won her the Advocating Cyprus Award at the CYDIA Awards 2026, held in Limassol in May.
She was one of four finalists put forward for the category before taking the win at a ceremony at the Parklane Resort & Spa, part of the Cyprus Diaspora Forum, in the presence of Cyprus’s Deputy Minister to the President, Irene Piki, representing President Nikos Christodoulides. The award recognises individuals whose work has raised the profile of Cyprus internationally, and it arrives at the end of a year in which Athanassiou has also taken the stage at the Diaspora Forum itself and appeared on Alpha TV Cyprus, a public visibility that would have seemed unlikely to the eleven year old at that dining table.
Athanassiou’s father was born in Cyprus and fought in the 1974 war, in which Turkish forces invaded and occupied the northern part of the island, displacing more than 150,000 Greek Cypriots, before he settled in Australia. He raised his family in Adelaide, where Cyprus existed mostly as a place spoken about rather than visited, the subject of stories at the kitchen table and the destination of Sunday phone calls to a grandmother on the other side of the world.
Those calls terrified her. “I’d reply to every question with ‘nai…’” she has said, using the Greek word for yes as a kind of shield. As a teenager she joined a Cypriot dance group, mingling with other diaspora kids and hearing more of the dialect there, though she has said she always understood far more than she could speak.
Athanassiou began attending Greek school late, at eleven, because her parents worked long hours running the family’s fish and chip shop and lived too far from a school to attend earlier. Once there, every phrase she offered was corrected, and she grew embarrassed to speak the language anywhere but home. It was only there, among aunts, uncles and parents, that Kypriaka felt unremarkable, spoken without a second thought, and it was there she came to love the storytelling that ran through it, the unhurried way a family story could stretch across an entire evening. Her first trips to Cyprus, taken only after she turned twenty, felt like a familiar home and a foreign one at once. She would find herself defaulting to English with relatives there too, and the same old panic would return.
After studying a Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia at the University of South Australia, Athanassiou then spent fifteen years in advertising, working on campaigns for Kia, Amex and Samsung at agencies including DDB and M&C Saatchi. The idea for Cyprusays arrived during lockdown, when she finally had the hours to sit with a question that had followed her for years, why no one had built a proper way to learn Cypriot Greek, rather than the answer she’d always been given by her own uncles, which was to move to the island and pick it up by ear. It began on a small desk in Sydney, in a yellow notebook. Her husband, Costas Athanassiou, joined the project as soon as she raised it with him, and the two of them worked through it over cups of Cypriot coffee, reaching out to linguists, sound engineers and app developers.
They tested the idea first with a simple website and a handful of emails. The response surprised them both. Messages arrived from Cypriots in Ireland, South Africa, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom, several describing the same embarrassment and anxiety Athanassiou remembered feeling herself. Building the app took longer than either of them expected and required a team well outside advertising: linguists Dr Spyros Armostis, Dr Natalia Pavlou, Constantina Fotiou and Dr Chryso Hadjidemetriou, trained at universities including Cambridge, Chicago and Essex, worked alongside the Athanassious to build the first structured reading and pronunciation guide the dialect has ever had. Armostis, a phonetician who coordinates the University of Cyprus’s phonetics laboratory, and Fotiou, who had already co-authored a textbook for teaching Cypriot Greek as a foreign language, brought academic grounding a project like this had never previously had.
Even with the linguistics settled, the build nearly stalled on something smaller: a single letter. Cypriot Greek uses accents and characters that Standard Modern Greek does not, and one of them, a tall zeta carrying its own diacritic mark, would not render correctly in any digital format the team tried. It fell to the company’s technology lead, Hoàng Nguyễn, to solve it, work Athanassiou has since described as having come close to derailing the entire launch.
Cyprusays went live in October 2025, combining native audio recordings, AI-assisted pronunciation feedback and lessons mapped to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the standard used across formal European language teaching. “It’s a tribute to our parents, grandparents and every Cypriot” who wants to keep the language alive, Athanassiou told the Cyprus Mail at the time. The app is, in part, a tribute to her late father too, and to the wider Kacopieros and Pericles families she grew up among. More than 22,000 people have signed up to learn through it, according to the company, and the Athanassious are now working to have Cyprusays adopted in community Greek schools across Australia, the UK and the US, with the longer aim of folding it into Cyprus’s own education system alongside standard Greek.
Cypriot Greek is spoken by around 650,000 people on the island and by considerably more across the diaspora, yet it has never held official status in Cyprus, where Standard Modern Greek remains the language of schooling and the media. That gap between the Greek spoken at home and the Greek taught in the classroom is exactly what shaped Athanassiou’s own experience of it as a child, and it is the gap Cyprusays is trying to close.
She is careful not to frame the project as an argument against Standard Greek, or as a claim that the dialect deserves to be anything more than what it already is. “Just to give it its own space, give it its respect,” she says. It is, in the end, not such a different instinct from the one her father had at that dining table in Adelaide, insisting that a tonos he had grown up hearing was worth defending.
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