Everything about Arawakan Languages totally explained
The
Arawakan languages (also
Arahuacan,
Arawakanas,
Arahuacano,
Maipurean,
Maipuran,
Maipureano,
Maipúrean) are an indigenous
language family of
South America and the
Caribbean.
Originally the name
Arawak was used exclusively for a powerful tribe in
Guyana and
Suriname. The tribe became allies of the Spanish because they traditionally were enemies of the
Carib groups with whom the Spanish were at war. Forms of the Arawak language are still spoken in
Suriname.
Arawakan vs. Maipuran
The term
Arawakan has been used in two senses. In one usage
Arawakan is synonymous to what has recently been called the
Maipurean or
Maipuran family, a core family of undoubtedly related languages. In other words,
Arawakan and
Maipurean are interchangeable.
However, in recent years, the two terms are no longer synonymous where
Maipurean refers to the core family of undoubtedly related languages and
Arawakan refers to a larger and hypothetical phylum at a level above Maipurean. In this sense, Maipurean is a sub-grouping under a (macro-)Arawakan stock along with
Guajiboan,
Arauan,
Candoshi,
Harákmbut, and the extinct
Puquina.
Kaufman (1990: 40) relates the following:
[TheArawakan] name is the one normally applied to what is here called Maipurean. Maipurean used to be thought to be a major subgroup of Arawakan, but all the living Arawakan languages, at least, seem to need to be subgrouped with languages already found within Maipurean as commonly defined. The sorting out of the labels Maipurean and Arawkan will have to await a more sophisticated classification of the languages in question than is possible at the present state of comparative studies.
Characteristics
The languages called Arawakan or Maipuran were originally recognized as a separate group in the late
nineteenth century. Almost all the languages now called Arawakan share a first-person singular prefix
nu-, but Arawak proper has
ta-. Other commonalities include a second-person singular
pi-, relative
ka-, and negative
ma-.
Geographic distribution
The Arawakan languages are spoken over a large swath of territory, from the eastern slopes of the central
Andes Mountains in
Peru and
Bolivia, across the
Amazon basin of
Brazil,
southward into
Paraguay and northward into to Suriname, Guyana,
Venezuela, and
Colombia on the northern coast of South America. It is the largest family in the Americas with the respect to number of languages (also including much internal branching) and covers the widest geographical area of any language group in
Latin America.
Taíno, commonly called Island Arawak, was spoken on the Caribbean islands of
Cuba,
Hispaniola,
Puerto Rico,
Jamaica, and the
Bahamas. Many of the Taino descendants today speak
English or
Spanish peppered with a few Taino words. The Taíno language has been very poorly preserved, yet it's undergoing a process of restoration by its community members, and its membership in the Arawakan family is generally accepted. Its closest relative among the better attested Arawakan languages seems to be the
Goajiro language, spoken in Colombia. It has been suggested that the Goajiro are descended from Taíno
refugees, but the theory seems impossible to prove or disprove.
The Carib people (after whom the Caribbean was named) formerly lived throughout the
Lesser Antilles. In the
seventeenth century, the language of the Island Carib was described by European
missionaries as two separate unrelated languages — one spoken by the men of the society and the other by the women. The language spoken by the men was a language of the Carib family very similar to the
Galibi language spoken in what later became
French Guyana. The language spoken by the woman belonged to the Arawakan language family. One might conclude, though there's a minimum of supporting evidence, that the Carib language was first spoken in eastern Venezuela and the
Guyanas. Also, because this peculiar dual gender-specific language arrangement was unstable and dynamic and can't have been very old, the Carib speakers had only recently migrated north into the Lesser Antilles at the time of European contact, displacing or assimilating the Arawaks in the process.
The Island Carib language is now
extinct, although Caribs still live on
Dominica,
Trinidad, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Despite its name, Island Carib was an Arawak language, as is its derived modern language
Garífuna (or Black Carib), which is thought to have about 590,000 speakers in
Honduras,
Nicaragua,
Guatemala and
Belize. The Garifuna are the descendants of Caribs and
black escaped slaves of
African origin, transferred by the British from
Saint Vincent to islands in the
Bay of Honduras in
1796. The Garifuna language continues the women's Arawak-based Island Carib language and only a few traces remain of the men's Carib speech.
Classification
Internal classification remains controversial. Few Arawakan languages are well attested, and there are considerable difficulties in distinguishing genealogical relatedness from areal features with current data. For now, only the lowest levels of classification are reliable.
Aikhenvald (1999)
Arawakan (73 languages)
- Guahiban (5 languages; Guahibo proper has 20,000 speakers)
- Arauán (8 or 9 languages; Culina has 1300 speakers)
- Maipuran (60 languages)
- Northern Maipuran
- Palikur (1 language, c. 1200 speakers)
- Wapishana-Caribbean (includes Ta-Arawak. 7 languages; Wayuu [Goajiro] c. 300,000 speakers, Garífuna [BlackCarib] c. 100,000 speakers)
- Inland (15 languages; Baniwa has 3-4000 speakers, Piapoco c. 3000)
- Southern Maipuran
- Campa (10 languages; Asháninca or Campa proper has 15-18,000 speakers, Ashéninca 18-25,000)
- Central (6 languages; Piro has c. 300 speakers)
- Amuesha (2 languages; Yanesha' has 6-8,000 speakers)
- Purus-Parana (10 languages, inc. Apurinã, Moxo, Terêna; Terêna has 10,000 speakers)
There are, in addition, 9 unclassified Maipuran languages.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Arawakan Languages'.
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