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The present chapter provides an outline of the long process through which Greek‐speaking populations were molded in the multilingual island laboratory of Cyprus. It focuses on a contextual analysis of the use of scripts and languages during the first millennium BC, primarily in relation to regional (city‐states) or island‐wide (Ptolemaic) political authorities, and integrates it with material data that underscore Cyprus's political economies. Greek, written in the syllabary, had become the “signature” of authority in the majority of the Cypriot micro‐states since the Archaic period. Following its annexation to the Ptolemaic Kingdom, in 294 BC, and the abolition of the independent polities, Cyprus turned monolingual; but the Greek language, which from then on became the island's only linguistic identity, was expressed in two different dialects: the ancient Arcado‐Cypriot and the koine.