| Cilician Arabic | |
| States: | Turkey |
| Speakers: | ? |
| Familycolor: | Afro-Asiatic |
| Fam2: | Semitic |
| Fam3: | Central Semitic |
| Fam4: | Arabic |
| Fam5: | Levantine Arabic |
| Fam6: | North Levantine Arabic |
| Script: | Arabic alphabet |
| Iso3comment: | (covered by apc) |
| Iso3: | none |
| Isoexception: | dialect |
| Glotto: | cili1234 |
| Glottorefname: | Cilicia-Antioch Arabic |
| 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]