This paper presents the first automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for Cypriot Greek, a non-standardized variety of Modern Greek with distinctive phonological, lexical, and orthographic characteristics. We adapt Whisper, a state-of-the-art multilingual ASR model, to Cypriot Greek through fine-tuning on the mozilla common voice spontaneous speech dataset for Cypriot Greek. The phonological and lexical divergence of Cypriot Greek from Standard Modern Greek poses significant challenges for mainstream ASR, particularly under conditions of limited training data and dialectal variation. Results demonstrate that whisper-medium achieved a best word error rate (WER) of 37.85%, while whisper-large-v3 consistently outperformed it, reaching a minimum WER of 33.93%. In the light of these findings, increased model size, combined with targeted fine-tuning on normalized dialectical data, significantly improves recognition accuracy, indicating that careful handling of orthographic and dialectical variation provides an effective path for ASR adaptation to low-resource varieties.

We present a cleansed version of the multilingual lexicon HURTLEX-(EL) comprising 737 offensive words of Modern Greek. We worked bottom-up in two annotation rounds and developed detailed guidelines by cross-classifying words on three dimensions: context, reference, and thematic domain. Our classification reveals a wider spectrum of thematic domains concerning the study of offensive language than previously thought Efthymiou et al. (2014) and reveals social and cultural aspects that are not included in the HURTLEX categories.