Garifuna language

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 confined to the northern parts of South America. It is also unusual because it contains a high number of loanwords, both from Carib languages and some European languages, due to a 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 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.

Distribution

Garifuna is spoken in Central America, especially in Honduras (146,000 speakers), 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, and in Houston, which has had a community of Central Americans since the 1980s. The first feature film in the Garifuna language, Garifuna in Peril, was released in 2012.