Research Note: Cypriot Television,Dialect Productions and Demotic Culture

Abstract

This article examines the television programme preferences in Cyprus over the last 10 years or so, from the English-language programmes popular during the public broadcasting monopoly period and up to the mid-1990s, to the imported Greek productions, in the Panhellenic demotic, after the pluralism of the 1990s and up to more recent times, when productions in the Cypriot dialect have become very popular on all Cypriot television channels. The significance of language in the expression of a people's culture is discussed, but at the same time, some of the content of the dialect programme offering is also described, to indicate the transition from rural to urban themes and modalities in dialect programmes. Today, Cypriots live in a changing, fragmented world. Could this phenomenal turn to dialect productions (with their satirical selfderision) be a voice of (modernized) demotic expression or is it a type of autochthonous cultural resistance to the embraces of Europeanization and globalization?