Most wedding guest lists in Cyprus and Greece are mixed — Greek family on one side, English-speaking friends on the other, and a sprinkling of cousins who switched languages a decade ago. The invitation has to work for all of them at once. Here's how to handle the small decisions that compound into either an elegant or a clumsy result.

Names

The hardest typographic problem on a bilingual wedding card is the name pair. Greek names use accented characters (ά, έ, ή, ί, ό, ύ, ώ) that some Latin-only fonts will silently substitute or omit. Always proof the couple's full names in both Greek and Latin transliteration in the actual font — don't trust the preview.

For mixed-language invitations the cleanest convention is to put each name pair on its own line — Greek above, English below, with a small separator between. That way neither language feels like a translation of the other; both feel primary.

Dates and times

Greek date formatting puts the day first, full month name in the genitive case ("Σάββατο, 13 Ιουνίου 2026, 19:00"), with 24-hour clock. English-speakers expect "Saturday, 13 June 2026, 7:00 PM" — month name in the nominative, 12-hour clock with AM/PM.

Decide which one is your "lead" format and stick with it; render the other inline alongside, in a slightly smaller weight, so the eye knows which is the primary. The mistake is rendering both at full weight side by side — it doubles the visual load without adding clarity.

RSVP form copy

Greek RSVP form labels are about 30% longer than English on average — "Will you be attending?" is "Θα παραστείτε;" (similar) but "How many guests will be in your party?" becomes "Πόσα άτομα θα είστε στη συνοδεία σας;". Plan the form layout for the longer language so it doesn't look cramped when guests switch.

Dietary preferences are where translation gets tricky. "Gluten-free" is "χωρίς γλουτένη" — fine. "Vegan" is most commonly translated as "vegan" in modern Greek, sometimes "βίγκαν" — both work. "Pescatarian" doesn't have a clean Greek equivalent; "ψαροφαγικό" is technically correct but reads stilted, so most invitations just leave it as "Pescatarian".

The language toggle

On a website rather than a printed card, give guests a single, obvious toggle in the header — labelled by the destination language ("Ελληνικά" when they're on the English page, "English" when they're on the Greek page). Don't use flag icons (a Greek flag for Greek is fine, but what flag would represent "English"? UK? US? Cyprus? None work well).

Persist the choice in a cookie so guests don't have to re-toggle on every page. And make sure your reminder emails respect the same preference — getting an English save-the-date and a Greek RSVP nudge feels disjointed.

What we do at Plus + One

Every Plus + One microsite ships bilingual EN/EL out of the box. We proof every name in both scripts before publication, set the locale- correct date formatter (Intl.DateTimeFormat('el-GR') for Greek, 'en-GB' for English), and run reminder copy through both languages so the toggle stays consistent end-to-end.

See the bilingual handling in action on our sample microsite, or read more about what's included with each tier.