All Topics  
Arawakan languages

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Arawakan languages
 
 
  Topics Arawakan languages Topic Home

The Arawakan languages (also Arahuacan, Arawakanas, Arahuacano, Maipurean, Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúrean) are an indigenous language family
Language family

A language family is a group of languages related Genetic from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family.As with Alpha taxonomy, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics....
 of South America
South America

South America is the southern continent of the Americas, situated entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere....
 and the Caribbean
Caribbean

The Caribbean is a region consisting of the Caribbean Sea, its islands , and the surrounding coasts. The region is located southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and Northern America, east of Central America, and to the north of South America....
.

Originally the name Arawak
Arawak

The term Arawak , was used to designate some of the peoples encountered by the Spain in the West Indies in 1492 and thereafter. These include the Ta?no, who occupied the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas and Bimini Florida, the Nepoya and Suppoyo of Trinidad and the Igneri, who were supposed to have preceded the Caribs in the Lesser Anti...
 was used exclusively for a powerful tribe in Netherlands Antilles
Netherlands Antilles

The Netherlands Antilles , previously known as the Netherlands West Indies or Dutch Antilles/West Indies, is part of the Lesser Antilles and consists of two island group in the Caribbean Sea: Cura?ao and Bonaire, just off the Venezuelan coast, and Sint Eustatius, Saba and Sint Maarten, located southeast of the Virgin Islands....
, Guyana
Guyana

Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana and previously known as British Guiana, is the only state of the Commonwealth of Nations on mainland South America....
 and Suriname
Suriname

Suriname , officially the Republic of Suriname is a country in northern South America. Originally, the country was spelled Surinam by English settlers who founded the first colony at Marshall's Creek, along the Suriname River, and was Geographical renaming Nederlands Guyana, Netherlands Guiana or Dutch Guiana....
. The tribe became allies of the Spanish because they traditionally were enemies of the Carib
Carib

Carib, Island Carib or Kalinago people, after whom the Caribbean Sea was named, live in the Lesser Antilles islands. They are an Amerindian people whose origins lie in the southern West Indies and the northern coast of South America....
 groups with whom the Spanish were at war.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Arawakan languages'
Start a new discussion about 'Arawakan languages'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


The Arawakan languages (also Arahuacan, Arawakanas, Arahuacano, Maipurean, Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúrean) are an indigenous language family
Language family

A language family is a group of languages related Genetic from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family.As with Alpha taxonomy, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics....
 of South America
South America

South America is the southern continent of the Americas, situated entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere....
 and the Caribbean
Caribbean

The Caribbean is a region consisting of the Caribbean Sea, its islands , and the surrounding coasts. The region is located southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and Northern America, east of Central America, and to the north of South America....
.

Originally the name Arawak
Arawak

The term Arawak , was used to designate some of the peoples encountered by the Spain in the West Indies in 1492 and thereafter. These include the Ta?no, who occupied the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas and Bimini Florida, the Nepoya and Suppoyo of Trinidad and the Igneri, who were supposed to have preceded the Caribs in the Lesser Anti...
 was used exclusively for a powerful tribe in Netherlands Antilles
Netherlands Antilles

The Netherlands Antilles , previously known as the Netherlands West Indies or Dutch Antilles/West Indies, is part of the Lesser Antilles and consists of two island group in the Caribbean Sea: Cura?ao and Bonaire, just off the Venezuelan coast, and Sint Eustatius, Saba and Sint Maarten, located southeast of the Virgin Islands....
, Guyana
Guyana

Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana and previously known as British Guiana, is the only state of the Commonwealth of Nations on mainland South America....
 and Suriname
Suriname

Suriname , officially the Republic of Suriname is a country in northern South America. Originally, the country was spelled Surinam by English settlers who founded the first colony at Marshall's Creek, along the Suriname River, and was Geographical renaming Nederlands Guyana, Netherlands Guiana or Dutch Guiana....
. The tribe became allies of the Spanish because they traditionally were enemies of the Carib
Carib

Carib, Island Carib or Kalinago people, after whom the Caribbean Sea was named, live in the Lesser Antilles islands. They are an Amerindian people whose origins lie in the southern West Indies and the northern coast of South America....
 groups with whom the Spanish were at war. Forms of the Arawak language are still spoken in Suriname
Suriname

Suriname , officially the Republic of Suriname is a country in northern South America. Originally, the country was spelled Surinam by English settlers who founded the first colony at Marshall's Creek, along the Suriname River, and was Geographical renaming Nederlands Guyana, Netherlands Guiana or Dutch Guiana....
.

Arawakan vs. Maipuran


The term Arawakan has been used in two senses. In one usage Arawakan is synonymous to what has recently been called the Maipurean
Maipurean

Maipurean is a language family that spans from the Caribbean and Central America to every country in South America excepting Uruguay and Chile....
 or Maipuran family, a core family of undoubtedly related languages. In other words, Arawakan and Maipurean are interchangeable.

However, in recent years, the two terms are no longer synonymous where Maipurean refers to the core family of undoubtedly related languages and Arawakan refers to a larger and hypothetical phylum at a level above Maipurean. In this sense, Maipurean is a sub-grouping under a (macro-)Arawakan stock along with Guajiboan, Arauan, Candoshi, Harákmbut, and the extinct Puquina.

Kaufman (1990: 40) relates the following:

[The Arawakan] name is the one normally applied to what is here called Maipurean. Maipurean used to be thought to be a major subgroup of Arawakan, but all the living Arawakan languages, at least, seem to need to be subgrouped with languages already found within Maipurean as commonly defined. The sorting out of the labels Maipurean and Arawkan will have to await a more sophisticated classification of the languages in question than is possible at the present state of comparative studies.


Characteristics

The languages called Arawakan or Maipuran were originally recognized as a separate group in the late nineteenth century. Almost all the languages now called Arawakan share a first-person singular prefix nu-, but Arawak proper has ta-. Other commonalities include a second-person singular pi-, relative ka-, and negative ma-.

Geographic distribution

The Arawakan languages are spoken over a large swath of territory, from the eastern slopes of the central Andes Mountains in Peru
Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
 and Bolivia
Bolivia

The Republic of Bolivia , named after Sim?n Bol?var, is a landlocked country in central South America. It is bordered by Brazil on the north and east, Paraguay and Argentina on the south, and Chile and Peru on the west....
, across the Amazon basin
Amazon Basin

The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. The basin is located mainly in Brazil, but also stretches into Peru and several other countries....
 of Brazil
Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is a country in South America. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the List of countries by population country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world....
, southward into Paraguay
Paraguay

Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay , is one of the only two landlocked countries in South America . It lies on both banks of the Paraguay River and is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to the east and northeast, and Bolivia to the northwest....
 and northward into to Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela
Venezuela

Venezuela , officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a country on the northern coast of South America.The country comprises a continental mainland and numerous islands located off the Venezuelan coastline in the Caribbean Sea....
, and Colombia
Colombia

Colombia , officially the Republic of Colombia , is a country in north-western South America. Colombia is bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the north west by Panama; and to the west by the Pacific Ocean....
 on the northern coast of South America. It 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
Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages ? particularly Spanish language and Portuguese language, and variably French language ? are primarily spoken....
.

Taíno
Taíno

The Ta?nos were Indigenous peoples of the Americas of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and the northern Lesser Antilles. It is believed that the seafaring Ta?nos were relatives of the Arawakan people of South America....
, commonly called Island Arawak, was spoken on the Caribbean islands of Cuba
Cuba

The Republic of Cuba is a country in the Caribbean. It consists of the island of Cuba , the island of Isla de la Juventud, and several adjacent small islands....
, Hispaniola
Hispaniola

Hispaniola is the second-largest and most populous island of the Antilles, lying between the islands of Cuba to the west, and Puerto Rico to the east....
, Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is a Autonomy Territories of the United States of the United States located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of the Virgin Islands....
, Jamaica
Jamaica

Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length and as much as in width situated in the Caribbean Sea. It is about south of Cuba, and west of the island of Hispaniola, on which Haiti and the Dominican Republic are situated....
, and the Bahamas. Many of the Taino descendants today speak English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 or Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
 peppered with a few Taino words. The Taíno language has been very poorly preserved, yet it is undergoing a process of restoration by its community members, and its membership in the Arawakan family is generally accepted. Its closest relative among the better attested Arawakan languages seems to be the Goajiro language, spoken in Colombia. It has been suggested that the Goajiro are descended from Taíno refugee
Refugee

Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecutionOwing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality,...
s, but the theory seems impossible to prove or disprove.

The Carib people (after whom the Caribbean was named) formerly lived throughout the Lesser Antilles
Lesser Antilles

The Lesser Antilles, also known as the Caribbees, are part of the Antilles, which together with the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and Greater Antilles form the West Indies....
. 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 was a language of the Carib family very similar to the Galibi
Galibi

The Galibi were a Cariban languages people who lived in the Lesser Antilles and northern South America at the time of European colonization of the Americas....
 language spoken in what later became French Guyana. The language spoken by the woman belonged to the Arawakan language family. One might conclude, though there is a minimum of supporting evidence, that the Carib language was first spoken in eastern Venezuela and the Guyanas
Guyanas

File:The Guianas.jpgGuyana, Guayana or Guiana usually refers to the country of Guyana.It may also refer to the larger region of The Guyanas or The Guianas, which includes the following three territories on the northeast coast of South America:...
. Also, because this peculiar dual gender-specific language arrangement was unstable and dynamic and cannot have been very old, the Carib speakers had only recently migrated north into the Lesser Antilles at the time of European contact, displacing or assimilating the Arawaks in the process.

The Island Carib language is now extinct
Extinct language

An extinct language is a language which no longer has any speakers .Extinct languages may be contrasted with Language death: no longer spoken as a main language....
, although Caribs still live on Dominica
Dominica

The Commonwealth of Dominica, commonly known as Dominica, is an island nation in the Caribbean Sea. To the north/northwest lies Guadeloupe, to the southeast Martinique....
, Trinidad
Trinidad

Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and islands of Trinidad and Tobago which make up the country of Trinidad and Tobago....
, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Despite its name, Island Carib was an Arawak language, as is its derived modern language Garífuna
Garifuna

The Garinagu are an ethnic group of mixed ancestry who live primarily in Central America. They live along the Caribbean Coast in Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras including the mainland, and on the island of Roat?n....
 (or Black Carib), which is thought to have about 590,000 speakers in Honduras
Honduras

Honduras is a democratic republic in Central America. It was formerly known as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras ....
, Nicaragua
Nicaragua

Nicaragua officially the Republic of Nicaragua , is a representative democracy republic. It is the largest state in Central America with an area of 130,000 km2, about the size of the state of New York....
, Guatemala
Guatemala

Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize and the Caribbean to the northeast, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast....
 and Belize
Belize

Belize , formerly British Honduras, is a country in Central America. Once part of the Maya civilization, and very briefly the Spanish Empire, it was most recently affiliated with the British Empire, prior to gaining its independence in 1981....
. The Garifuna are the descendants of Caribs and black
Black people

Black people is a term usually referring to a Race of humans with a dark skin color, but the term has also been used to categorise a number of diverse populations into one common group....
 escaped slaves
Maroon (people)

Maroon was a term used to refer to a runaway slavery in the West Indies, Central America, South America, and North America. Descendants of Maroon populations are found in Jamaica, Colombia, the Amazon River Basin and the American states of Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia ....
 of Africa
Africa

Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km? including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area....
n origin, transferred by the British from Saint Vincent
Saint Vincent (island)

Saint Vincent is a volcanic island in the Caribbean, the largest island of the chain called Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. It is located in the Caribbean Sea, between Saint Lucia and Grenada....
 to islands in the Bay of Honduras in 1796. The Garifuna language continues the women's Arawak-based Island Carib language and only a few traces remain of the men's Carib speech.

Classification

Internal classification remains controversial. Few Arawakan languages are well attested, and there are considerable difficulties in distinguishing genealogical relatedness from areal features with current data. For now, only the lowest levels of classification are reliable.

Aikhenvald (1999)

Arawakan (73 languages)
  • Guahiban (5 languages; Guahibo proper has 20,000 speakers)
  • Arauán (8 or 9 languages; Culina has 1300 speakers)
  • Maipuran (60 languages)
    • Northern Maipuran
      • Palikur (1 language, c. 1200 speakers)
      • Wapishana-Caribbean (includes Ta-Arawak. 7 languages; Wayuu
        Wayuu language

        The Wayuu language is spoken by 305,000 indigenous Wayuu in northwestern Venezuela and northeastern Colombia on the Guajira Peninsula.Wayuu is part of the Maipurean linguistic family predominant in different parts of the Caribbean....
         [Goajiro] c. 300,000 speakers, Garífuna [Black Carib] c. 100,000 speakers)
      • Inland (15 languages; Baniwa has 3-4000 speakers, Piapoco c. 3000)
    • Southern Maipuran
      • Campa (10 languages; Asháninca or Campa proper has 15-18,000 speakers, Ashéninca 18-25,000)
      • Central (6 languages; Piro has c. 300 speakers)
      • Amuesha (2 languages; Yanesha'
        Yanesha' language

        Yanesha , also called Amuesha or Amoesha is a language spoken by the Amuesha people of Peru in central and eastern Pasco Region.Due to the influence and domination of the Inca Empire, Yanesha' has many loanwords from Quechua, including some core vocabulary....
         has 6-8,000 speakers)
      • Purus-Parana (10 languages, inc. Apurinã, Moxo, Terêna; Terêna has 10,000 speakers)


There are, in addition, 9 unclassified Maipuran languages.

See also


  • Maipurean
    Maipurean

    Maipurean is a language family that spans from the Caribbean and Central America to every country in South America excepting Uruguay and Chile....
  • Arawak
    Arawak

    The term Arawak , was used to designate some of the peoples encountered by the Spain in the West Indies in 1492 and thereafter. These include the Ta?no, who occupied the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas and Bimini Florida, the Nepoya and Suppoyo of Trinidad and the Igneri, who were supposed to have preceded the Caribs in the Lesser Anti...
  • List of Taínos
    List of Taínos

    This is a list of known Ta?nos, some of which were Caciques or Cacicas . Their names are in alphabetical order.The Ta?no are pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples of the Americas inhabitants of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and some of the Lesser Antilles....
  • Taínos
  • List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin
    List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin

    This is a list of Spanish language words that come from Indigenous languages of the Americas. It is further divided into words that come from Arawakan languages, Aymara language, Carib languages, Mayan languages, Nahuatl language, Quechua language, Tarahumara, Tupi languages, and uncertain ....
  • Cariban languages
    Cariban languages

    The Cariban languages are an indigenous language family of South America. Carib languages are widespread across northern South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes and from Maracaibo to Central Brazil....
  • Carib
    Carib

    Carib, Island Carib or Kalinago people, after whom the Caribbean Sea was named, live in the Lesser Antilles islands. They are an Amerindian people whose origins lie in the southern West Indies and the northern coast of South America....
  • Taino
    Taíno

    The Ta?nos were Indigenous peoples of the Americas of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and the northern Lesser Antilles. It is believed that the seafaring Ta?nos were relatives of the Arawakan people of South America....
  • Garifuna
    Garifuna

    The Garinagu are an ethnic group of mixed ancestry who live primarily in Central America. They live along the Caribbean Coast in Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras including the mainland, and on the island of Roat?n....
  • Neo-Taíno nations
    Neo-Taíno Nations

    Neo-Ta?no are the pre-Columbian indigenous Amerindian inhabitants of Cuba, the Lucaya, Bahamas of the Bahamas, Jamaica, and to a lesser extent of Haiti and Quisqueya as opposed to the Ta?no of Boriquen ....


External links

  • Ethnologue:
  • Ethnologue:
  • Proel:
  • Proel:
  • Proel:


Bibliography


  • Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (1999). The Arawak language family. In R. M. W. Dixon & A. Y. Aikhenvald (Eds.), The Amazonian languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-57021-2; ISBN 0-521-57893-0.
  • Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
  • Derbyshire, Desmond C. (1992). Arawakan languages. In W. Bright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of linguistics (Vol. 1, pp. 102-105). New Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com).
  • Kaufman, Terrence. (1990). Language history in South America: What we know and how to know more. In D. L. Payne (Ed.), Amazonian linguistics: Studies in lowland South American languages (pp. 13-67). Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-70414-3.
  • Kaufman, Terrence. (1994). The native languages of South America. In C. Mosley & R. E. Asher (Eds.), Atlas of the world's languages (pp. 46-76). London: Routledge.
  • Migliazza, Ernest C.; & Campbell, Lyle. (1988). Panorama general de las lenguas indígenas en América (pp. 223). Historia general de América (Vol. 10). Caracas: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia.
  • Payne, David. (1991). A classification of Maipuran (Arawakan) languages based on shared lexical retentions. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (Eds.), Handbook of Amazonian languages (Vol. 3, pp. 355-499). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.