Pre-Arawakan languages of the Greater Antilles

Pre-Arawakan languages of the Greater Antilles
(cultural / historical)
Geographic distribution:	Greater Antilles
Linguistic classification:	unclassified (not known to be related to each other)
Subdivisions:	Guanahatabey Macorix Ciguayo
Glottolog:	(not evaluated)
Precolombian languages of the Antilles.   Guanahatabey   Macorix   Ciguayo   Ciboney Taíno   Classic Taíno   Iñeri   Karina   Yao Ciboney Taíno, Classic Taíno, and Iñeri were Arawakan, Karina and Yao were Cariban. Guanahatabey, Macoris, and Ciguayo are unclassfied.

Several languages of the Greater Antilles, specifically Cuba and Hispaniola, appear to have preceded the Arawakan Taíno. Almost nothing is known of them, though a couple recorded words, along with a few toponyms, suggest they were not Arawakan or Cariban, the families of the attested languages of the Antilles. Three languages are recorded: Guanahatabey, Macoris (or Macorix, apparently in two dialects), and Ciguayo.

Guanahatabey has in the past been called "Ciboney". The name is a misnomer. The Ciboney were an apparently Taíno population of the western Great Antilles, whose language is also unattested. A misreading of historical sources confused the Ciboney with the pre-Arawakan population of the islands.

There were three pre-Arawakan populations at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and they were extinct within a century. These were the Guanahatabey of western Cuba, the Macorix (Mazorij) in two populations, the Pedernales Peninsula and northeastern Hispaniola (modern Dominican Republic), and the Ciguayo (Siwayo) of northeastern Hispaniola (Samaná Peninsula). They were evidently completely unintelligible with Taíno. Ciguayo and Macorix were apparently moribund when chronicler De las Casas arrived on the island in 1502. He wrote in his Historia (1527–1559),

However, elsewhere he notes that the neighboring languages were not intelligible with each other,

Little else is known of the languages apart from the word for gold in Ciguayo, tuob, mentioned in the sentence immediately preceding the first passage above:

Tuob, whether two syllables or one ([tu.ob] or [twob]), is not a possible Taíno word. Both the Arawak and Carib languages had a simple CV-syllable structure, suggesting that Ciguayo was not just unintelligible, but actually of a different language family than the two known languages of the Caribbean. Granberry (1991) has speculated that they may have been related, not to the languages of South America as Taíno was, but to languages of Central America which had more similar syllable structures. Western Cuba is close enough to the Yucatán Peninsula for there to have been crossings by canoe at the time of the Conquest.