CHAPTER THREE ADDRESSING WRITING SYSTEM ISSUES IN DIALECTAL LEXICOGRAPHY: THE CASE OF CYPRIOT GREEK SPYROS ARMOSTI, KYRIAKI CHRISTODOULOU, MARIANNA KATSOYANNOU, AND CHARALAMBOS THEMISTOCLEOUS UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS 1. Introduction Cypriot Greek is a variety of Modern Greek spoken by almost a million people in the Republic of Cyprus. Even though Greek Cypriots predominantly speak Cypriot Greek in their everyday interaction, their variety has never been standardized; instead, the standard variety of the state of Greece, namely Standard Modern Greek, is used as one of the two official languages of Cyprus (the other being Standard Turkish). The standardization of Cypriot Greek, in the sense of promoting it as an official language, has never been a desideratum for the vast majority of Greek Cypriots, due to the complex sociolinguistic and political situation in Cyprus. Thus, overt language policies have never been officially declared by the state (Papapavlou 2010, 127), nor has the standardization of the dialect, even in the narrow sense of writing system codification, been promoted. Nevertheless, there is a need for codifying the writing system (i.e. script and orthography) of Cypriot Greek; in fact, this need is evident both from the increasing academic interest on the subject by scholars in various fields (e.g., sociolinguistics, lexicography, typographic design, education), and also from a range of situations wherein writers choose to or must write in Cypriot Greek, and hence are inevitably faced with the quandary of how to write in this non-codified variety. Dialectal dictionaries play an important role in tackling this problem, as writers may resort to dictionaries for help on how to represent Cypriot Greek. This paper aims to explore the interrelation of dialectal dictionaries and the codification of the dialect ’s writing system: it will be argued that