Garifuna language
| Garifuna | |
|---|---|
| Native to | north coast of Honduras and Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast |
| Region | Historically the Northern Caribbean coast of Central America from Belize to Nicaragua |
| Ethnicity | Garifuna people |
|
Native speakers
|
possibly 190,000 (1997) |
|
Arawakan languages
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | gari1256 |
Garifuna (Karif) is a minority language still widely spoken in villages of Garifuna people in the western part of the northern coast of Central America. It is a member of the Arawakan languages family but an atypical one since it is spoken outside of the Arawakan language area, which is otherwise confined to the northern parts of South America, and because it contains an unusually high number of loanwords, from both Carib languages and a number of European languages because of an extremely tumultuous past involving warfare, migration and colonization. The language was once confined to the Antillean islands of St. Vincent and Dominica, but its speakers, the Garifuna people, were deported en masse by the British in 1797 to the north coast of Honduras from where the language and Garifuna people have since spread along the coast south to Nicaragua and north to Guatemala and Belize. It is still widely spoken in many Garifuna villages throughout this coastal region. In recent years, a large number of Garifunas have settled in larger US cities, presumably as part of a more general pattern of northbound migration.
Parts of Garifuna vocabulary are split between men's speech and women's speech, and some concepts have two words to express them, one for women and one for men. Moreover, the terms used by men are generally loanwords from Carib while those used by women are Arawak.
The Garifuna language was declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2008 along with Garifuna music and dance.
Garifuna is spoken in Central America, especially in Honduras (146,000 speakers), but also in Guatemala (20,000 speakers), Belize (14,100 speakers), Nicaragua (2,600 speakers), and the US, particularly in New York City, where it is spoken in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. By the 1980s, the influx of Central Americans made languages including Garifuna begin having a presence in Houston. The first feature film in the Garifuna language, Garifuna in Peril, was released in 2012.
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