Cariban languages | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-11-05

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Cariban languages

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SUMMARY
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The Cariban languages are an indigenous language family of South America. They are widespread across northernmost South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes but also appear in central Brazil. Cariban languages are relatively closely related. There are two to three dozen of them, depending on what is considered a dialect. Most are still spoken but often by only a few hundred speakers; the only one with more than a few thousand is Macushi, which has 30,000. The Cariban family is well known in the linguistic world partly because Hixkaryana's default word order is object–verb–subject, which had previously not been thought to exist in human language.
Some years prior to the arrival of the first Spanish explorers, Caribs invaded and occupied the Lesser Antilles and killed, displaced or assimilated the Arawaks who had inhabited the islands. The resulting language was Carib in name but largely Arawak in substance. That was because the invading Carib men killed Arawak men and took Arawak wives, who then passed their language on to the children. For a time, Arawak was spoken by women and children and Carib by adult men, but the situation was unstable. 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 "Island Carib" became extinct in the Lesser Antilles in the 1920s but survives in the form of 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 pre-Columbian population, the Carib Indians, about 3,000 of whom live on the island's east coast.