Cypriot is unique among the Modern Greek dialects in possessing such a variegated vocabulary testimony indeed to the chequered history of the island. This book presents a thorough investigation of the foreign component of the Cypriot lexis. It traces firstly the relevant sociocultural factors that gave rise to it. It presents secondly a detailed account of how words from sources as diverse as Romance Arabic Turkish and English became fully nativised and indistinguishable from the native stock. A fresh case study of language and lexical borrowing it addresses such issues as the extent of lexical borrowing the types of vocabulary borrowed the relationship between the social integration and the structural adaptation of loans and the degree and predictability of the phonological morphological and even semantic modification affecting foreign words.