The Greek I learnt at my mother’s knee was greatly modified, at the age of 7, when I attended primary school. It was accepted that one spoke “proper” Greek as opposed to Cypriot Greek – heavily accented and with its own words (sometimes of Homeric origin , like λαλώ) scattered here and there.
Emigrating 18 months later to London meant attending Greek school on Saturday mornings. The great and the good at the church school would hide their Cypriot origins by trying to talk “posh” with varying rates of success.
When my daughter was born, my mother kept berating me about the Cypriot I used. It needed to be cleaned up into the accepted higher level radio Greek.
Suffice it to say that I lost interest in imparting the language to my daughter, who, having an English father. Was happy to lapse into English only.
Subsequently, I’ve heard from Greeks in Cyprus how they don’t rate their own Cypriot accent/ dialects and chose to heap scorn in those who still use it.
What their reasons for this might be, I’ll leave to conjecture. But, for a small island under occupation by a foreign country , imposing its own culture and language and further culturally compromised by the recent entry of Overwhelming numbers of Europeans and Russians… I would have thought that self-effacement of a great part of Cypriot cultural roots would be considered by any thinking person as cultural suicide.