Metalanguage or bidialectism? acquisition of clitic placement by Hellenic Greeks, Greek Cypriots and binationals in the diglossic context of Cyprus

Acquisition of object clitics is one of the more investigated aspects of the largely understudied variety of Modern Greek spoken in the Republic of Cyprus. Previous studies on the acquisition of clitics in Cypriot Greek usually acknowledge that the linguistic reality in Cyprus involves a state of diglossia, where the sociolinguistically ‘high’ Standard Modern Greek co-exists with the ‘low’ Cypriot Greek. Acquisition of clitic placement in simple declaratives is here approached through a picture-based elicitation task by testing both varieties in three populations residing in Cyprus — Greek Cypriots, Hellenic Greeks, and binationals — so as to examine implications for bidialectism and its connections with enhanced metalinguistic abilities.