This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2015) |
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 | 120,000 (2001–2019) [1] |
Official status | |
Recognised minority language in | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | cab |
Glottolog | gari1256 |
ELP | Garífuna |
Language, dance and music of the Garifuna | |
---|---|
Country | Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua |
Reference | 00001 |
Inscription history | |
Inscription | 2001 (2008 session) |
Garifuna (Karif) is a minority language 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 language family but an atypical one since it is spoken outside the Arawakan language area, which is otherwise now 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 by the British in 1797 to the north coast of Honduras [2] from where the language and Garifuna people has since spread along the coast south to Nicaragua and north to Guatemala and Belize.
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. [3]
Garifuna is spoken in Central America, especially in Honduras (146,000 speakers),[ citation needed ] 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, [4] and in Houston, which has had a community of Central Americans since the 1980s. [5] The first feature film in the Garifuna language, Garifuna in Peril , was released in 2012. [6]
The Garinagu (singular Garifuna) are a mix of West/Central African, Arawak, and Carib ancestry. Though they were captives removed from their homelands, these people were never documented as slaves. The two prevailing theories are that they were the survivors of two recorded shipwrecks or they somehow took over the ship on which they came. The more Western and Central African-looking people were deported by the British from Saint Vincent to islands in the Bay of Honduras in 1796. [7]
Their linguistic ancestors, 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 took Arawakan women for wives. 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.
Descriptions of Island Carib people in the 17th century missionaries from Europe record the use of two languages: Carib as spoken by the men, and Arawak as spoken by the women. It is conjectured that the males retained the core Carib vocabulary while the grammatical structure of their language mirrored that or Arawak. As such, Island Carib as spoken by males is considered either a mixed language or a relexified language. The West African influence in Garifuna is limited to a handful of loanwords and perhaps intonation. Contrary to what some believe, there is no influence from "African phonetics" as there is no such thing as a singular African phonetic system as languages in West Africa and Africa in general have extremely diverse phoneme inventories. The distinction between Garifuna and the Kalinago language can be explained by simple evolution due to the separation of the Garifuna being sent to Central America.
The vocabulary of Garifuna is composed as follows:[ citation needed ]
Also, there also some few words from African languages. [ citation needed ]
Meaning | Garifuna | Carib |
---|---|---|
man | wügüri | wokyry |
woman | würi | woryi |
European | baranagüle | paranakyry (one from the sea, parana) |
good | irufunti (in older texts, the f was a p) | iru'pa |
anger/hate | yeregu | areku |
weapon/whip | arabai | urapa |
garden | mainabu (in older texts, maina) | maina |
small vessel | guriara | kurijara |
bird | dunuru (in older texts, tonolou) | tonoro |
housefly | were-were | werewere |
tree | wewe | wewe |
lizard/iguana | wayamaga | wajamaka |
star | waruguma | arukuma |
sun | weyu | weju |
rain | gunubu (in older texts, konobou) | konopo |
wind | bebeidi (in older texts bebeité) | pepeito |
fire | watu | wa'to |
mountain | wübü | wypy |
water, river | duna (in older texts tona) | tuna |
sea | barana | parana |
sand | sagoun (in older texts saccao) | sakau |
path | üma | oma |
stone | dübü | topu |
island | ubouhu (in earlier texts, oubao) | pa'wu |
Relatively few examples of diglossia remain in common speech. It is possible for men and women to use different words for the same concept such as au ~ nugía for the pronoun "I", but 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 "person" 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.
Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | m | n | ɲ | |||
Plosive | voiceless | p | t | tʃ | k | |
voiced | b | d | ɡ | |||
Fricative | f | s | h | |||
Approximant | w | l | j | |||
Tap/Flap | ɾ |
Front | Central | Back | |
---|---|---|---|
Close | i | ɨ | u |
Mid | ɛ ~ e | ɔ ~ o | |
Open | a |
Independent personal pronouns in Garifuna distinguish the social gender of the speaker:
singular | plural | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
male speaker | female speaker | |||
1st person | au | nugía | wagía | |
2nd person | amürü | bugía | hugía | |
3rd person | masculine | ligía | hagía | |
feminine | tuguya |
The forms au and amürü are of Cariban origin, and the others are of Arawakan origin.
Garifuna distinguishes singular and plural numbers for some human nouns. The marking of in nouns is realized through suffixes:
The plural of Garífuna is Garínagu.
Plural animate nouns use animate plural agreement on verbs and other sentence elements. Inanimate nouns do not show plural agreement.
Possession on nouns is expressed by personal prefixes:
For the Garifuna verb, the grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood, negation, and person (both subject and object) are expressed by affixes (mostly suffixes), partly supported by particles (second-position enclitics).
The paradigms of grammatical conjugation are 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/past 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,[ citation needed ] which, in today's French, is apparent at "80":
The reason for the use of French borrowings rather than Carib or Arawak terms is unclear, but may have to do with their succinctness, as numbers in indigenous American languages, especially those above ten, tend to be longer and more cumbersome.[ citation needed ]
The word order is verb–subject–object (VSO, fixed). [11]
Garifuna is an agglutinative language. [11]
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link), with supplementary sound recordings.Lingala (Ngala) is a Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser degree in Angola, the Central African Republic, Kenya and southern South Sudan. Lingala has 25–30 million native speakers and about 35 million second-language speakers, for an approximate total of 60–65 million speakers.
Animacy is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age.
The Cariban languages are a family of languages indigenous to north-eastern South America. They are widespread across northernmost South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes, and they are also spoken in small pockets of central Brazil. The languages of the Cariban family are relatively closely related. There are about three dozen, but most are spoken only by a few hundred people. Macushi is the only language among them with numerous speakers, estimated at 30,000. The Cariban family is well known among linguists partly because one language in the family—Hixkaryana—has a default word order of object–verb–subject. Prior to their discovery of this, linguists believed that this order did not exist in any spoken natural language.
Arawak, also known as Lokono, is an Arawakan language spoken by the Lokono (Arawak) people of South America in eastern Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. It is the eponymous language of the Arawakan language family.
Chavacano or Chabacano is a group of Spanish-based creole language varieties spoken in the Philippines. The variety spoken in Zamboanga City, located in the southern Philippine island group of Mindanao, has the highest concentration of speakers. Other currently existing varieties are found in Cavite City and Ternate, located in the Cavite province on the island of Luzon. Chavacano is the only Spanish-based creole in Asia. The 2020 Census of Population and Housing counted 106,000 households generally speaking Chavacano.
Hadza is a language isolate spoken along the shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania by around 1,000 Hadza people, who include in their number the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa. It is one of only three languages in East Africa with click consonants. Despite the small number of speakers, language use is vigorous, with most children learning it, but UNESCO categorizes the language as vulnerable.
Neapolitan is a Romance language of the Italo-Romance group spoken in Naples and most of continental Southern Italy. It is named after the Kingdom of Naples, which once covered most of the area, since the city of Naples was its capital. On 14 October 2008, a law by the Region of Campania stated that Neapolitan was to be protected.
Lithuanian grammar retains many archaic features from Proto-Balto-Slavic that have been lost in other Balto-Slavic languages.
Tokelauan is a Polynesian language spoken in Tokelau and historically by the small population of Swains Island in American Samoa. It is closely related to Tuvaluan and is related to Samoan and other Polynesian languages. Tokelauan has a co-official status with English in Tokelau. There are approximately 4,260 speakers of Tokelauan, of whom 2,100 live in New Zealand, 1,400 in Tokelau, and 17 in Swains Island. "Tokelau" means "north-northeast".
Yuchi or Euchee is the language of the Tsoyaha, also known as the Yuchi people, now living in Oklahoma. Historically, they lived in what is now known as the southeastern United States, including eastern Tennessee, western Carolinas, northern Georgia, and Alabama, during the period of early European colonization. Many speakers of the Yuchi language became allied with the Muscogee Creek when they migrated into their territory in Georgia and Alabama. They were forcibly relocated with them to Indian Territory in the early 19th century.
The morphology of the Welsh language has many characteristics likely to be unfamiliar to speakers of English or continental European languages like French or German, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, and Breton. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and mood, with affirmative, interrogative, and negative conjugations of some verbs. There is no case inflection in Modern Welsh.
Arawakan, also known as Maipurean, is a language family that developed among ancient indigenous peoples in South America. Branches migrated to Central America and the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, including what is now the Bahamas. Almost all present-day South American countries are known to have been home to speakers of Arawakan languages, the exceptions being Ecuador, Uruguay, and Chile. Maipurean may be related to other language families in a hypothetical Macro-Arawakan stock.
Bulgarian grammar is the grammar of the Bulgarian language. Bulgarian is a South Slavic language that evolved from Old Church Slavonic—the written norm for the Slavic languages in the Middle Ages which derived from Proto-Slavic. Bulgarian is also a part of the Balkan sprachbund, which also includes Greek, Macedonian, Romanian, Albanian and the Torlakian dialect of Serbian. It shares with them several grammatical innovations that set it apart from most other Slavic languages, even other South Slavic languages. Among these are a sharp reduction in noun inflections—Bulgarian has lost the noun cases but has developed a definite article, which is suffixed at the end of words. In its verbal system, Bulgarian is set apart from most Slavic languages by the loss of the infinitive, the preservation of most of the complexities of the older conjugation system and the development of a complex evidential system to distinguish between witnessed and several kinds of non-witnessed information.
Wayuu, or Guajiro, is a major Arawakan language spoken by 400,000 indigenous Wayuu people in northwestern Venezuela and northeastern Colombia on the Guajira Peninsula and surrounding Lake Maracaibo.
In linguistics, an honorific is a grammatical or morphosyntactic form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. Distinct from honorific titles, linguistic honorifics convey formality FORM, social distance, politeness POL, humility HBL, deference, or respect through the choice of an alternate form such as an affix, clitic, grammatical case, change in person or number, or an entirely different lexical item. A key feature of an honorific system is that one can convey the same message in both honorific and familiar forms—i.e., it is possible to say something like "The soup is hot" in a way that confers honor or deference on one of the participants of the conversation.
The morphology of the Welsh language shows many characteristics perhaps unfamiliar to speakers of English or continental European languages like French or German, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, and Breton. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs conjugate for person, tense and mood with affirmative, interrogative and negative conjugations of some verbs. A majority of prepositions inflect for person and number. There are few case inflections in Literary Welsh, being confined to certain pronouns.
Warndarrang (waɳʈaraŋ), also spelt Warndarang, Wanderang, Wandaran, and other variants is an extinct Aboriginal Australian language in the Arnhem family, formerly spoken by the Warndarrang people in southern Arnhem Land, along the Gulf of Carpentaria. The last speaker was Isaac Joshua, who died in 1974, while working with the linguist Jeffrey Heath.
Yawalapiti (Jaulapiti) is an Arawakan language of Brazil. The Agavotaguerra (Agavotoqueng) reportedly spoke the same language. Speakers of the language live in a village along the edge of the river Tuatuari, a tributary of the Kuluene River, located in the southern part of the Xingu Indigenous Park, in the state of Mato Grosso.
Pidgin Delaware was a pidgin language that developed between speakers of Unami Delaware and Dutch traders and settlers on the Delaware River in the 1620s. The fur trade in the Middle Atlantic region led Europeans to interact with local native groups, and hence provided an impetus for the development of Pidgin Delaware. The Dutch were active in the fur trade beginning early in the seventeenth century, establishing trading posts in New Netherland, the name for the Dutch territory of the Middle Atlantic and exchanging trade goods for furs.
Roquetas Pidgin Spanish is a Spanish-based pidgin spoken among agricultural workers in Roquetas de Mar in Spain. Immigrants attracted to work in the greenhouses of the area come from many countries in north and west Africa and eastern Europe, and few speak any Spanish before arrival. The resulting pidgin has such typical characteristics as an avoidance of antonyms.
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(March 2010) |