Garifuna Language - History

History

Garifuna traces its history through Carib, Arawakan, and African peoples. The Carib people, who gave their name to the Caribbean, once lived throughout the Lesser Antilles, and although their language is now extinct there, ethnic Caribs still live on Dominica, Trinidad, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent. The Caribs had conquered the previous population of the islands, Arawakan peoples like the Taino and Palikur peoples. During the conquest, which was conducted primarily by men, the Carib married Arawakan women. Children were raised by their mothers speaking Arawak, but as boys came of age, their fathers taught them Carib, a language still spoken in mainland South America. When European missionaries described the Island Carib people in the seventeenth century, they recorded two unrelated languages—Carib spoken by the men and Arawak spoken by the women. However, while the boys acquired Carib vocabulary, after a few generations they retained the Arawakan grammar of their first language. Thus Island Carib as spoken by the men was genetically either a mixed language or a relexified language. Over the generations, men substituted fewer Arawak words, and many Carib words diffused to the women, so that the amount of distinctly male vocabulary diminished, until both genders spoke Arawak with an infusion of Carib vocabulary and distinct words in only a handful of cases.

During the colonial era, escaped slaves of African origin joined Island Carib society and acquired the language. As the race of the people changed, the language and people came to be known as Black Carib. Many of these people were transferred by the British from Saint Vincent to islands in the Bay of Honduras in 1796.