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. In the 16th century, Cariban peoples expanded into the
Lesser Antilles. There they killed or displaced, and also mixed with the
Arawak peoples who already inhabited the islands. The resulting language—
Kalhíphona or Island Carib—was Carib in name but largely Arawak in substance. The Carib male conquerors took Arawak women as wives, and the latter passed on their own language on to the children. For a time, Arawak was spoken by women and children and Carib by adult men, but as each generation of Carib-Arawak boys reached adulthood, they acquired less Carib until only basic vocabulary and a few grammatical elements were left. That form of
Island Carib became extinct in the
Lesser Antilles in the 1920s, but it survives as
Garífuna, or "Black Carib," in
Central America. The gender distinction has dwindled to only a handful of words.
Dominica is the only island in the eastern
Caribbean to retain some of its Indigenous population, descendants of the
Kalinago people, about 3,000 of whom live on the island's east coast. 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 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: There are also a few words from
African languages.
Comparison to Carib 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 for the pronoun "I", but most such words are rare and often not currently used by men. For example, there are distinct Carib and Arawak words for "man" and "women", four words altogether, but often the generic terms or
gürígiya "person" are used by both men and women and for both men and women, with grammatical gender agreement on a verb, adjective, or demonstrative, distinguishing whether these words refer to a man or to a woman ( "the man", "the woman"). There remains, however, a diglossic distinction in the
grammatical gender of a few inanimate nouns, with abstract words generally being considered grammatically feminine by men and grammatically masculine by women. Thus, the word 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 ==