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UD_Greek-Cretan

Cretan is a variety of Modern Greek predominantly used by speakers who reside on the island of Crete or belong to the Cretan diaspora. This includes communities of Cretan origin that were relocated to the village of Hamidieh in Syria and to Western Asia Minor, following the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The historical and geographical factors that have shaped the development and preservation of the dialect include the long-term isolation of Crete from the mainland, and the successive domination of the island by foreign powers, such as the Arabs, the Venetians, and the Turks, over a period of seven centuries. Cretan has been divided based on its phonological, phonetic, morphological, and lexical characteristics into two major dialect groups: the western and the eastern. The boundary between these groups coincides with the administrative division of the island into the prefectures of Rethymno and Heraklion. Kontosopoulos (2008) argues that the eastern dialect group is more homogeneous than the western one, which shows more variation across all levels of linguistic analysis. Contrary to other Modern Greek Dialects, Cretan does not face the threat of extinction, as it remains the sole means of communication for a large number of speakers in various parts of the island.

The model was trained using the 6th round of the East Cretan dataset, consisting of 180 training sentences, 60 development sentences, and 30 test sentences. This round provided a total of 2976 tokens for training, 1129 tokens for development, and 523 tokens for testing.

To cite this work or read more about the training pipeline, see:

Socrates Vakirtzian, Vivian Stamou, Yannis Kazos, Stella Markantonatou. Dialectal treebanks and their relation with the standard variety: The case of East Cretan and Standard Modern Greek. NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025, Talin.