Taíno language

"Taíno" was not originally an ethnic or linguistic appellation, and there is some dispute over its appropriateness and what its scope should be. The terms "Arawak language" or "Island Arawak language" were sometimes used historically, but the term Taíno has been widely adopted since the 1980s to avoid confusion with the Lokono language of South America. ==Dialects==

The 19th century anthropologist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque wrote that "...from Bahama to Cuba, Boriquen to Jamaica, the same language was spoken in various slight dialects, but understood by all." According to Rafinesque, "Columbus himself says so." In Columbus's letter on the first voyage, he wrote that a common language was spoken in the "islas de India" and that people from different islands visited each other by canoe and could understand each other. A later passage in Columbus's letter notes that there were differences between this language and Kalinago (Island Carib) to the east, due to the great distance between their lands, and also that there were two or three distinct languages on Hispaniola, with the common language spoken throughout the greater part of the island. Julian Granberry and Gary Vescelius (2004) distinguish two dialects of Taíno, one in the east and the other in the north and west: • Classic (Eastern) Taíno, spoken in Classic Taíno and Eastern Taíno cultural areas. These were the Lesser Antilles north of Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, central Hispaniola, and the Turks & Caicos (from an expansion in ). Classic Taíno was expanding into eastern and even central Cuba at the time of the Spanish Conquest, perhaps from people fleeing the Spanish in Hispaniola. • (Western) Taíno, spoken in Ciboney and Lucayan cultural areas. These were most of Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas. Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that Xaraguá was the main dialect of the primary language spoken in Hispaniola at the time the Spaniards arrived. Xaraguá was also spoken in parts of Cuba. Las Casas notes that there were also languages that were unintelligible with Xaragua: ("Three languages on this island [of Hispaniola] were distinct, in that they could not understand one another; the first was that of the people [of the region] we called the Lower Macorix, and the other that of their neighbors of the Upper Macorix [the Ciguayos], which we described above as the 4th and 6th provinces; the other language was the universal one of all the land".) ==Phonology==

The Taíno language was not written; what we know of it is recorded in Spanish transcription. The following phonemes are reconstructed from Spanish records: The flap appears to have been an allophone of . The realization occurred at the beginning of a word and the realization occurred between vowels. Some Spanish writers used the letter in their transcriptions, which could represent , or in the Spanish orthography of their day. Certain potential cognates suggest a value of , however. for example, the Kalinago word transcribed by French missionaries as chaouái has been connected to the Taíno word xagüeye "cave". A distinction between and is suggested by Spanish transcriptions of e vs ei/ey, as in ceiba "ceiba". The is written ei or final é in modern reconstructions. There was also a high back vowel , which was often interchangeable with and may have been an allophone. There was a parallel set of nasal vowels. The nasal vowels and were rare. Consonant clusters were not permitted in the onset of syllables. The only consonant permitted at the end of a syllable or word in most cases was . One exception was the suffix -(e)l, which indicated the masculine gender, as in warokoel "our grandfather". Some words are recorded as ending in x, which may have represented a word-final sound. In general, stress was predictable and fell on the penultimate syllable of a word, unless the word ended in , or a nasal vowel, in which case it fell on the final syllable. ==Grammar==

Classic Taíno is not well attested. However, from what can be gathered, nouns appear to have had noun-class suffixes, as in other Arawakan languages. Attested Taíno possessive prefixes are da- 'my', wa- 'our', li- 'his' (sometimes with a different vowel), and to-, tu- 'her'. Recorded conjugated verbs include daka ("I am"), waibá ("we go" or "let us go"), warikẽ ("we see"), kãma ("hear", imperative), ahiyakawo ("speak to us") and makabuka ("it is not important"). Verb-designating affixes were a-, ka-, -a, -ka, -nV in which "V" was an unknown or changeable vowel. This suggests that, like many other Arawakan languages, verbal conjugation for a subject resembled the possessive prefixes on nouns. The negating prefix was ma- and the attributive prefix was ka-. Hence makabuka meant "it is not important". The buka element has been compared to the Kalinago suffix -bouca which designates the past tense. Hence, makabuka can be interpreted as meaning "it has no past". However, the word can also be compared to the Kalinago verb aboúcacha meaning "to scare". This verb is shared in various Caribbean Arawakan languages such as Lokono (bokaüya 'to scare, frighten') and Parauhano (apüüta 'to scare'). In this case makabuka would mean "it does not frighten [me]". Modern-day Neo-Taíno constructs follow slightly different grammar and word order from each other. ==Vocabulary==

Taíno borrowed words from Spanish, adapting them to its phonology. These include ("sword", from ), ("mirror", from ) and (God in Christianity, from ). English words derived from Taíno include: barbecue, caiman, canoe, cassava, cay, guava, hammock, hurricane, hutia, iguana, macana, maize, manatee, mangrove, maroon, potato, savanna, and tobacco. as well as the previous English words in their Spanish form: barbacoa, caimán, canoa, casabe, cayo, guayaba, hamaca, huracán, iguana, jutía, macana, maíz, manatí, manglar, cimarrón, patata, sabana, and tabaco. Place names According to Granberry and Vescelius, research has identified 39 Aboriginal island names in the Lucayan archipelago, including: • Grand Bahama: 'large-upper-middle' • Bimini: 'twins' • Inagua: 'small eastern land' • North Caicos: 'near-northern-outlier' • Borinquen (confederated kingdom of Puerto Rico): , (native) (land) 'native land' ==Sample sentences==

Six sentences of spoken Taíno were preserved. They are presented first in the original orthography in which they were recorded, then in a regularized orthography based on the reconstructed language, and lastly in their English translation: == Revival projects ==

Since the 2010s, there have been several projects to build a modern Neo-Taíno lexicon by way of comparative linguistics with better-attested Arawakan languages. Puerto Rican linguist Javier Hernandez published his Primario Basíco del Taíno-Borikenaíki in 2018 after a 16-year spanning research project with positive reception among the diaspora. In 2023, Jorge Baracutay Estevez, the Higuayagua Taino cultural organization and linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald published Hiwatahia: Hekexi Taino Language Reconstruction, a formatted 20,000 word dictionary based on Ta-Arawakan languages. Higuayagua Taino provides classes for the community. Due to limited historical documentation, Taino language revival projects may differ from Indigenous languages historically spoken in the Greater Antilles. According to Lucia Faria of the University of Toronto, while some Taino language revivalists "draw their conception of the language to the ways their ancestors spoke, others do not necessarily hold that same objective" and are not exclusively interested in "sounding or speaking in the same way as their ancestors", thus these "language reclamation efforts are more concerned with progress and connections than they are with accuracy." According to linguists Konrad Rybka and Andrés Sabogal, projects seeking to revive a Taino language have "led to a mixing of data across the ages, the privileging of Taíno etymologies for words of unknown origin, and even the invention of Taíno words" and that some allegedly Taino words "are in fact Cariban". ==References==