The Cariban languages are a family of languages indigenous to north-eastern South America. They are widespread across northernmost South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes, and they are also spoken in small pockets of central Brazil. The languages of the Cariban family are relatively closely related. There are about three dozen, but most are spoken only by a few hundred people. Macushi is the only language among them with numerous speakers, estimated at 30,000. The Cariban family is well known among linguists partly because one language in the family—Hixkaryana—has a default word order of object–verb–subject. Prior to their discovery of this, linguists believed that this order did not exist in any spoken natural language.
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 pre-Columbian population, descendants of the Carib Indians, about 3,000 of whom live on the island's east coast.
The Cariban languages share irregular morphology with the Jê and Tupian families. Ribeiro connects them all in a Je–Tupi–Carib family.[citation needed] Meira, Gildea, & Hoff (2010) note that likely morphemes in proto-Tupian and proto-Cariban are good candidates for being cognates, but that work so far is insufficient to make definitive statements.
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Guato, Kawapana, Nambikwara, Taruma, Warao, Arawak, Bororo, Jeoromitxi, Karaja, Rikbaktsa, and Tupi language families due to contact.[1]
Extensive lexical similarities between Cariban and various Macro-Jê languages suggest that Cariban languages had originated in the Lower Amazon region (rather than in the Guiana Highlands). There they were in contact with early forms of Macro-Jê languages, which were likely spoken in an area between the Parecis Plateau and upper Araguaia River.[1]: 425
The Cariban languages are closely related. In many cases where one of the languages is more distinct, this is due to influence from neighboring languages rather than an indication that it is not closely related. According to Kaufman (2007), "Except for Opon, Yukpa, Pimenteira and Palmela (and possibly Panare), the Cariban languages are not very diverse phonologically and lexically (though more so than Romance, for example)."[2]
Good data has been collected around ca. 2000 on most Cariban languages; classifications prior to that time (including Kaufman 2007, which relies on the earlier work) are unreliable.
Several such classifications have been published; the one shown here, by Derbyshire (1999) divides Cariban into seven branches. A traditional geographic classification into northern and southern branches is cross referenced with (N) or (S) after each language.[3]
The extinct Patagón de Perico language of northern Peru also appears to have been a Cariban language, perhaps close to Carijona. Yao is so poorly attested that Gildea believes it may never be classified.
Preliminary internal classification of the Cariban languages according to Sérgio Meira (2006):[4]: 169
As of Gildea (2012), there had not yet been time to fully reclassify the Cariban languages based on the new data. The list here is therefore tentative, though an improvement over the one above; the most secure branches are listed first, and only two of the extinct languages are addressed.[6]
Meira, Birchall & Chousou-Polydouri (2015) give the following phylogenetic tree of Cariban, based on a computational phylogenetic analysis of 100-item Swadesh lists.[7]
Meira, Birchall & Chousou-Polydouri (2015) conclude that the Proto-Cariban homeland was located north of the Amazon River, and that there is no evidence for a northward migration from the south, as previously proposed by Rodrigues (1985).[8] Rather there were two southern migrations (Pekodian and Nahukwa into the Upper Xingu).
Internal classification by Jolkesky (2016):[1]
(† = extinct)
Below is a full list of Cariban language varieties listed by Loukotka (1968), including names of unattested varieties.[9]
Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for the Cariban (Karaib) languages.[9]
Proto-Cariban phonology according to Gildea (2012):[6]: 448
Proto-Cariban reconstructions by Gildea (2007, 2012):[11][12]
