can you understand this TC dialect of the GC language:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJGWppxcQx0

basically it is a Chatista, from the TC village of Lurucina/Louroujina.

Thats one of my villages, i have a lot of distant relatives there, lurugina is an interesting village as before 74 everyone used to speak greek better than they would speak turkish. However because of the constant fighting in nearby villages, namely yeri and potamia they were also one of the most nationalistic TC's on the island.

I understood it perfectly.

In fact as Turkkan said you can tell he speaks very good Greek as he has very little of the usualy distinct TC accent.

How common is chatista amongst the older generation?

Chatista is still quite common amongst the very old folk, but it is beginning to slowly die out.

to my understanding it is has already mostly died out amongst the GC's.

its not unusual to find elderly TC's who speak Greek better than they do Turkish, especially those who came from ethnically mixed isolated villages.

btw what is the story about? the only word i think i can make out is "poushti" towards the end lol

Hmm, your conversation about the dialects aside, these types of recordings, to me, look very valuable... and interesting.

Are there people regularly "collecting" these Chatistas? Sounds like a pretty important folk tradition & deserves to be properly documented.

Nobody really records/collects them.

they just kind of spontaneously happen in the village coffee houses and taverns lol.

Raven can understand or speak Greek?

There have been a few books by Greek Cypriot scholars collecting and recording traditional and important Cypriot cultural gems. I think there is also a book on Chatista.

As for what the TC is saying in the first post, it is a mixture of things rather than a story from start to finish - ranging from poverty to lust.

The most striking thing about the video was the TC family casually speaking to each other in Greek instead of Turkish (and that video is quite recent).

Turkkan, is Greek still widely spoken around there amongst even <45 year old TCs?

no, for one lurigina is almost a abandoned village, its suffered a lot from drought over the past decade so nothing can be cultivated there and most of the inhabitants have had to move to another village. No one under 45 knows greek, and the old generations greek although present is quite broken now. Having said that remember im talking about lurigina only here as people always used to speak greek in this village as a first language, it was the only TC village on the island to do so. Any young TC who now knows greek has only learnt it (and usually nothing great) due to their own accord by probably studying the language in turkey or doing courses in cyprus in the south.

How did you learn Greek Turkkan? As far as I know you were born and grew up in England.

No i mainly grew up in cyprus but have been living in london for a few yeas now.

I'm actually kind of surprised that this dialect still exists on the other side of the green line. If you would have told me this was taken in Larnaka or Lemmesos you could have fooled me completely.