Garifuna language

Last updated

Garifuna
Native toNorth Coast of Honduras and Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast
RegionHistorically the Northern Caribbean coast of Central America from Belize to Nicaragua
Ethnicity Garifuna people
Native speakers
120,000 (2001–2019) [1]
Arawakan
Official status
Recognised minority
language in
Language codes
ISO 639-3 cab
Glottolog gari1256
ELP Garífuna
Language, dance and music of the Garifuna
CountryBelize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua
Reference 00001
Region Latin America and the Caribbean
Inscription history
Inscription2008 (3rd session)
List Representative
Recording of a Garifuna speaker

Garifuna (Karif) is a minority language widely spoken in villages of Garifuna people in the western part of the northern coast of Central America.

Contents

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]

Distribution

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]

Sociolinguistic history

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.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Garifuna is composed as follows:[ citation needed ]

   Arawak (Igneri) (45%)
   Carib (Kallínagu) (25%)
   French (15%)
   English (10%)
   Spanish or English technical terms (5%)

Also, there also some few words from African languages. [ citation needed ]

Comparison to Carib

[8] [9]
MeaningGarifuna Carib
manwügüriwokyry
womanwüriworyi
Europeanbaranagüleparanakyry (one from the sea, parana)
goodirufunti (in older texts, the f was a p)iru'pa
anger/hateyereguareku
weapon/whiparabaiurapa
gardenmainabu (in older texts, maina)maina
small vesselguriarakurijara
birddunuru (in older texts, tonolou)tonoro
houseflywere-werewerewere
treewewewewe
lizard/iguanawayamagawajamaka
starwarugumaarukuma
sunweyuweju
raingunubu (in older texts, konobou)konopo
windbebeidi (in older texts bebeité)pepeito
firewatuwa'to
mountainwübüwypy
water, riverduna (in older texts tona)tuna
seabaranaparana
sandsagoun (in older texts saccao)sakau
pathümaoma
stonedübütopu
islandubouhu (in earlier texts, oubao)pa'wu

Gender differences

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.

Phonology

Consonants
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ɲ
Plosive voiceless p t k
voiced b d ɡ
Fricative f s h
Approximant w l j
Tap/Flap ɾ
Vowels
Front Central Back
Close i ɨ u
Mid ɛ ~ e ɔ ~ o
Open a

[ o ] and [ e ] are allophones of /ɔ/ and /ɛ/. [10]

Grammar

Personal pronouns

Independent personal pronouns in Garifuna distinguish the social gender of the speaker:

singularplural
male speakerfemale speaker
1st personaunugíawagía
2nd personamürübugíahugía
3rd personmasculineligíahagía
femininetuguya

The forms au and amürü are of Cariban origin, and the others are of Arawakan origin.

Number

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

Possession on nouns is expressed by personal prefixes:

Verb

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.

Examples

The conjugation of the verb alîha "to read" in the present continuous tense:

  • n-alîha-ña "I am reading"
  • b-alîha-ña "you (singular) are reading"
  • l-alîha-ña "he is reading"
  • t-alîha-ña "she is reading"
  • wa-lîha-ña "we are reading"
  • h-alîha-ña "you (plural) are reading"
  • ha-lîha-ña "they are reading"

The conjugation of the verb alîha "to read" in the simple present/past tense:

  • alîha-tina "I read"
  • alîha-tibu "you (singular) read"
  • alîha-ti "he reads"
  • alîha-tu "she reads"
  • alîha-tiwa "we read"
  • alîha-tiü "you (plural) read"
  • alîha-tiñu "they (masculine) read"
  • alîha-tiña "they (feminine) read"

There are also some irregular verbs.

Numerals

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 ]

Syntax

The word order is verb–subject–object (VSO, fixed). [11]

Morphology

Garifuna is an agglutinative language. [11]

Notes

  1. Garifuna at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed Access logo transparent.svg
  2. Dreyfus-Gamelon, Simone (1993). "Et Christophe Colomb vint...". Ethnies. Chroniques d'une conquête (14): 104.
  3. "Language, dance and music of the Garifuna". unesco.org. 2008. Archived from the original on 7 December 2014. Retrieved 1 January 2015.
  4. Torrens, Claudio (28 May 2011). "Some NY immigrants cite lack of Spanish as barrier". UTSanDiego.com. Archived from the original on 1 February 2015. Retrieved 10 February 2013.
  5. Rodriguez 1987 , p. 5
  6. "Independent Honduran-American Film "Garifuna in Peril" Will Premiere in Honduras". Honduras Weekly. 17 October 2013. Archived from the original on 13 January 2018. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
  7. Crawford, M. H. (1997). "Biocultural adaptation to disease in the Caribbean: Case study of a migrant population" (PDF). Journal of Caribbean Studies. 12 (1): 141–155. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 November 2012.
  8. "A Caribbean Vocabulary Compiled In 1666". United Confederation of Taino People. Archived from the original on 20 May 2008. Retrieved 20 May 2008.
  9. "Kali'na Vocabulary". Max Planck Digital Library. Archived from the original on 14 March 2012. Retrieved 23 March 2012.
  10. Haurholm-Larsen 2016 , pp. 18–21
  11. 1 2 Ravindranath, Maya (22 December 2009). "Language Shift and the Speech Community: Sociolinguistic Change in a Garifuna Community in Belize". Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. Archived from the original on 26 May 2024. Retrieved 10 October 2022.

Further reading

Related Research Articles

French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lingala</span> Bantu language spoken in western central Africa

Lingala 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 as a trade language or because of emigration in neighbouring Angola or Central African Republic. Lingala has 20 million native speakers and about another 20 million second-language speakers, for an approximate total of 40 million speakers. A significant portion of both Congolese diasporas speaks Lingala in their countries of immigration like Belgium, France or the United States.

The plural, in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one. Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word boys, which corresponds to the singular boy.

The Garifuna people are a people of mixed free African and Amerindian ancestry that originated in the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent and speak Garifuna, an Arawakan language, and Vincentian Creole.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cariban languages</span> Group of languages

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arawak language</span> Arawakan language spoken in South America

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuchi language</span> Language of the Yuchi people in the southeastern United States

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 grammar of the Persian language is similar to that of many other Indo-European languages. The language became a more analytic language around the time of Middle Persian, with fewer cases and discarding grammatical gender. The innovations remain in Modern Persian, which is one of the few Indo-European languages to lack grammatical gender, even in pronouns.

In linguistics, agreement or concord occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.

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.

Teso is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken by the Teso people of Uganda and Kenya and some speakers are in South Sudan. It is part of the Teso–Turkana language cluster.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arawakan languages</span> Language family of indigenous peoples in South America

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 and Smaller 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.

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry grammatical information or lexical information . Inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. Derivational suffixes fall into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wayuu language</span> Major Arawakan language spoken in the Guajira Peninsula

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.

Marra, sometimes formerly spelt Mara, is an Australian Aboriginal language, traditionally spoken on an area of the Gulf of Carpentaria coast in the Northern Territory around the Roper, Towns and Limmen Bight Rivers. Marra is now an endangered language. The most recent survey was in 1991; at that time, there were only 15 speakers, all elderly. Most Marra people now speak Kriol as their main language. The remaining elderly Marra speakers live in the Aboriginal communities of Ngukurr, Numbulwar, Borroloola and Minyerri.

Yoke is a poorly documented language spoken by about 200 people in the north of Papua, Indonesia. The name is also spelled Yoki, Yauke, and it is also known as Bitovondo. It was spoken in a single village in the interior until the government relocated a third of the population to a new village, Mantarbori, on the coast. In the late 19th century, a word list of "Pauwi" was collected by Robidé van der Aa at Lake Rombebai, where the Yoke say they migrated from; this is transparently Yoke, apart from some words which do not appear in the modern language but are found in related Warembori.

The Pauna language, Paunaca, Paunaka, is an Arawakan language in South America. It is an extremely endangered language, which belongs to the southern branch of the Arawakan language family and it is spoken in the Bolivian area of the Chiquitanía, near Santa Cruz and north of the Chaco region. The suffix -ka is a plural morpheme of the Chiquitano language, but has been assimilated into Pauna.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kalinago language</span> Arawakan language historically spoken in the Lesser Antilles

The Kalinago language, also known as Island Carib and Igneri, was an Arawakan language historically spoken by the Kalinago of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. Kalinago proper became extinct by about 1920 due to population decline and colonial period deportations resulting in language death, but an offshoot survives as Garifuna, primarily in Central America.

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.

References