| Also Known As: Central American Carib,Black Carib,Caribe,Garífuna,Garifuna
Description:
Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken in Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize by the Garifuna people. Historically it was referred to as Carib or Black Carib and Igñeri by Europeans. One interesting feature of Garifuna is a vocabulary split between terms used only by men and terms used only by women. This does not however affect the entire vocabulary but when it does, the terms used by men generally come from Carib and those used by women come from Arawak.
Garifuna is spoken in Central America, especially in Honduras (about 128,000 speakers), but also in Guatemala (about 20,000 speakers), Belize (about 15,000 speakers), Nicaragua, and within the USA in New York City.
The vocabulary of Garifuna is composed as follows:
Apart from that, there also some few words from African languages.
In Garifuna there are six vowels: a, e, i, o, ü, and u.
The system of consonants does not show any peculiarities: b, ch, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, w, y.
With independent personal pronouns, Garifuna distinguishes masculine and feminine gender:
The forms au and amürü are of Cariban origin, the others are of Arawakan origin.
Pluralization of nouns is irregular, it is realized by means of suffixing...... full article at Wikipedia |
