Geographic distribution Of Arawakan languages Arawak is the largest family in the Americas with the respect to number of languages (also including much internal branching) and covers the widest geographical area of any language group in Latin America.[citation needed] The Arawakan languages have been spoken by peoples occupying a large swath of territory, from the eastern slopes of the central Andes Mountains in Peru and Bolivia, across the Amazon basin of Brazil, southward into Paraguay and northward into Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, and Colombia on the northern coast of South America, and as far north as Belize and Guatemala. Arawak-speaking peoples migrated to islands in the Caribbean, settling the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas. It is possible that some poorly-attested extinct languages in North America, such as the Cusabo and Congaree in South Carolina, were members of this family. Taíno, commonly called Island Arawak, was spoken on the islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. A few Taino words are still used by English or Spanish-speaking descendants in these islands. The Taíno language was scantily attested but its classification within the Arawakan family is uncontroversial. Its closest relative among the better attested Arawakan languages seems to be the Goajiro language, spoken in Colombia. Scholars have suggested that the Goajiro are descended from Taíno refugees, but the theory seems impossible to prove or disprove. Among the Arawakan peoples were the Carib, after whom the Caribbean was named, who formerly lived throughout the Lesser Antilles. In the seventeenth century, the language of the Island Carib was described by European missionaries as two separate, unrelated languages—one spoken by the men of the society and the other by the women. The language spoken by the men, which they called Carib, was very similar to the Galibi language spoken in what later became French Guyana. At the time, the missionaries thought it was not part of Arawakan, which they identified the women as speaking. This unique dual gender-specific language arrangement was unstable and dynamic and cannot have been very old. Scholars think it suggests that the male Carib speakers had recently migrated north into the Lesser Antilles at the time of European contact, displacing or assimilating the male Arawaks in the process. The Island Carib language is now extinct, although Carib people still live on Dominica, Trinidad, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Despite its name, Island Carib was an Arawak language. Its derived modern language, Garífuna (or Black Carib), is also Arawak and was developed among mixed-race African-Carib peoples. It is estimated to have about 590,000 speakers in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize. The Garifuna are the descendants of Caribs and escaped slaves of African origin, transferred by the British from Saint Vincent to islands in the Bay of Honduras in 1796. The Garifuna language is derived from the womens Arawak-based Island Carib language and only a few traces remain of the mens Carib speech. Today the Arawakan languages with the most speakers are among the more recent Ta-Arawakan (Ta-Maipurean) groups: Wayuu [Goajiro], with about 300,000 speakers; and Garífuna [Black Carib], with about 100,000 speakers. The Campa group is next; Asháninca or Campa proper has 15–18,000 speakers; and Ashéninca 18–25,000. After that probably comes Terêna, with 10,000 speakers; and Yanesha [Amuesha] with 6–8,000.
Posted on: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:19:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015