| Garifuna | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in | Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast |
| Region | Historically the Northern Caribbean coast of Central America from Belize to Nicaragua |
| Ethnicity | Garifuna people |
| Native speakers | 200,000 (no date) (98,000 in Honduras cited 1993) |
| Language family | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | cab |
Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken in Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize by the Garifuna people. The language is also spoken to a lesser extent in Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast. Historically it was referred to as Carib or Black Carib and Igñeri by Europeans. Garifuna has a vocabulary split between terms used only by men and terms used only by women. This does not however affect the entire vocabulary but when it does, the terms used by men generally come from Carib and those used by women come from Arawak. It was declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2009 along with Garifuna music and dance.[1]
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Garifuna is spoken in Central America, especially in Honduras (about 98,000 speakers), but also in Guatemala (about 16,700 speakers), Belize (about 16,100 speakers), Nicaragua (about 1,500 speakers), and within the USA, particularly New York City.
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.
The vocabulary of Garifuna is composed as follows:
Apart from that, there also some few words from African languages.
Relatively few examples of diglossia remain in common speech, where men and women use different words for the same concept, such as au ~ nugía for the pronoun "I". Most such words are rare, and often dropped by men. For example, there are distinct Carib and Arawak words for 'man' and 'women', four words altogether, but in practice the generic term mútu is used by both men and women and for both men and women, with grammatical gender agreement on a verb, adjective, or demonstrative distinguishing whether mútu refers to a man or to a woman (mútu lé "the man", mútu tó "the woman").
There remains, however, a diglossic distinction in the grammatical gender of many inanimate nouns, with abstract words generally being considered grammatically feminine by men, and grammatically masculine by women. Thus the word wéyu may mean either concrete "sun" or abstract "day"; with the meaning of "day", most men use feminine agreement, at least in conservative speech, while women use masculine agreement. The equivalent of the abstract impersonal pronoun in phrases like "it is necessary" is also masculine for women, but feminine in conservative male speech.
With independent personal pronouns, Garifuna distinguishes masculine and feminine gender:
| singular, male speaker | singular, female speaker | plural | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person | au | nugía | wagía |
| 2nd person | amürü | bugía | hugía |
| 3rd person | ligía | tugía | hagía |
The forms au and amürü are of Cariban origin, the others are of Arawakan origin.
Pluralization of nouns is irregular, it is realized by means of suffixing. For example:
The plural of Garífuna is Garínagu.
Possession on nouns is expressed by personal prefixes:
On the Garifuna verb, the grammatical categories tense, aspect, mode, negation, and person (both subject and object) are expressed by means of affixes, partly supported by particles.
The paradigms of conjugation are very numerous.
The conjugation of the verb alîha "to read" in the present continuous tense:
The conjugation of the verb alîha "to read" in the simple present tense:
There are also some irregular verbs.
From "3" upwards, the numbers of Garifuna are exclusively of French origin and are based on the Vigesimal system, which in today's Standard French is only apparent at "80":
The language uses prepositions and conjunctions.
The word order is verb–subject–object (VSO).
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