gr2ǫλ: A Greeklish-to-Greek converter

Greeklish is a transliteration of the Greek language written using Roman characters. This phenomenon started in the 1980’s, when the Greek language was unfortunately covered by multiple ASCII extensions (codepages) which were incompatible. This lead to communication problems, with users being forced to guess the correct encoding of every message, document and webpage. Making matters worse, public discussions were frequently in different encodings, requiring the user to switch encodings to read each reply in a threaded conversation. In the present day, despite the success of Unicode standardization, Greeklish still is the de facto standard for electronic communication. It is used almost exclusively for personal e-mails, instant messages and sometimes even for business correspondance or marketing e-mails! The Academy of Athens swiftly criticized the romanization of the Greek language, considering it “a full-fledged attack against the classical greek thinking” (aca ). Although this is an exaggeration, a study shows that most users under 35 consider Greeklish a necessary evil when using the Internet and every participant in the study has used Greeklish at least once (Androutsopoulos 1999). Apart from being aesthetically unpleasent, Greeklish creates three problems: