Cilician Arabic | |
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Native to | Turkey |
Afro-Asiatic
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Arabic alphabet | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | (covered by apc) |
Glottolog |
cili1234 |
IETF | apc-TR |
Cilician Arabic, Cilicia-Antioch Arabic, Çukurova Arabic, or Çukurovan is a Levantine dialect spoken in Turkey in the geo-cultural area of Cilicia, the coastal region of the Turkish Eastern Mediterranean from Hatay to Mersin and Adana. [1] [2]
Cilician Arabic speakers in Turkey come from four different religious groups: Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Christians (including Greek Orthodox and Catholics), and Jews. It is difficult to know the number speakers. Due to pressures against minority languages, younger generations of the Arabic-speaking communities increasingly use Turkish as their mother tongue. In 1971, 36% of the population in Hatay was Arabic-speaking. In 1996, Grimes estimated 500,000 speakers of North Levantine Arabic in Turkey. [3]
In 2011, according to Procházka there were 70,000 Çukurova Arabic speakers in the Adana and Mersin provinces and people under 30 years old had completely switched to Turkish. [4] In 2011, Werner estimated 200,000 Antiochia Arabic speakers in Hatay. [5] According to Ethnologue, the language is "threatened" in Turkey. [6] Çukurova Arabic is in danger of becoming extinct in a few decades. [4]