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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 (Venezuela) to Central Brazil. Cariban languages are relatively close to each other; in some cases, it is difficult to decide whether different groups speak different languages or dialects of the same language. Because of this, the exact number of Cariban languages is not known with certainty (current estimates range from 25 to 40, with 20 to 30 still spoken). The Cariban family is well known in the linguistic world due to Hixkaryana, a language with Object-Verb-Subject sentences, previously thought not to exist in human language. Some years prior to the arrival of the first Spanish explorers, Carib-speaking peoples had invaded and occupied the Lesser Antilles, killing, displacing or forcibly assimilating the Arawakan peoples who inhabited the islands. They never reached the Greater Antilles or the Bahamas. Curiously, the Carib language quickly died out while the Arawakan language was maintained over the generations. This was the result of the invading Carib men usually killing the local men of the islands they conquered and taking Arawak wives who then passed on their own language to the children. For a time, Arawak was spoken primarily or exclusively by women and children, while adult men spoke Carib. Eventually, as the first generation of Carib-Arawak children reached adulthood, the more familiar Arawak became the only language used in the small island societies. This language was called Island Carib, even though it is not part of the Carib linguistic family. It is now extinct, but was spoken on the Lesser Antilles until the 1920's (primarily in Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Trinidad). A linguistic descendant of Island Carib, Garífuna, continues to be spoken in Honduras and Belize, and is also known as Caribe or Black Carib.
Family division Cariban itself is tentatively divided into two to four branches. Northern Carib languages Southern Carib languages Genetic relations It has been proposed that the Cariban family may be distantly related to Macro-Je and Tupi languages in a "Je-Tupi-Carib" stock, but this is highly speculative, and the internal relationships of these families are still poorly known. See also | ||||||||
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