Black Caribs or Garinagu speak an Amerindian language that originated with the Caribs on the islands in the Caribbean. The Garinagu might be African in appearance with their lustrous dark skin and curly hair; however, their language and culture take more from the island Caribs, the warrior-cannibal group that Columbus found and named--the people and the sea. The remnants of the original Indian Caribs now live on Dominica and St. Vincent. They have the high cheek bones and deep yellow-brown skin with long straight black hair that resembles other Amerindian people. These last Caribs live on reserves on these islands and they speak only creole or English. A few of the oldest do remember one or two words in Carib). In the 1980's, the Garinagu of Belize and Honduras made several intercultural exchange visits with St. Vincent and Dominica to bring the language, drumming and dancing to the Caribs on the Islands from the Garinagu on the mainland.
Those on the mainland had preserved their language, culture and religious practices. They had even become united enough in the past 40 years to ask that they be called to by the name that they have for themselves: "Garinagu" when referring to the people as a whole, or "Garifuna" where referring to a person or the culture. The language developed from an Arawak-Maipure family of languages with about a third of the concepts coming from Kalina or Guiana Carib with very few words that can be traced to Africa. Since fighting the French, English and Spanish, and finally losing to the French, several words have come into their language from their conquerors and opponents. Many of the words for counting money in Garifuna are from the French (ex: dar su from the French trente sous--thirty cents). References to teachers and priests are from Spanish (méisturu from maestro, and fádiri from padre). The Garinagu that live in Belize have added English words to their vocabulary with a Garifuna twist: car becomes karü and airplane is erupláno. At this time about 500,000 Garinagu live in Central America mostly in Honduras with 8,000 in Belize, a former British Colony, and a few thousand more in Guatemala (Livingston) and Nicaragua (Blue Fields).
I wanted to learn to speak this language but I was soon bewildered with the complexity. The Garifuna language has a relatively small number of morphemes used to construct a large and nuanced language. They also use derivation and inflection to form more words than in English. Carib words for "strong," "weak," "difficult," "easy," and "to be rough" (as rough sea), come from -ere, "strength." From agu, "eye," come the adjectives for "jealous," "blind," "lazy," and also the verb agagudua, "to awake." Most of the inflectional words must be translated into English as a sentence or a phrase, for example: garaotu, "she has a child (or children)"; garaoharu, "she has had (given birth to) a child"; garaogiru, "she still has a child"; and maraotu, "she is childless"; maraoharu, "she no longer has a child"; maraogiru, "she has not yet had a child." (Taylor, p. 44).
Garifuna is one of the languages where the speech of the men differs from the speech of the women. This difference is now disappearing except in song and ritual. Historically the warrior-men lived separately from the women. There does not seem to have been a formal arrangement for couples and the harem form continued even into Belize in the 19th Century.
eyeri - man (women's speech)
Although the Garinagu people physically appear to be African and are the genetic decedents of Africans brought to the new world, their language and culture are basically from their rescuers, the island Caribs. It is indeed unusual that these island Caribs have lost the language while their African-Amerindian descendants on the mainland of Central America have kept alive the language and with it the culture of this Arawak-Maipure tribe.
Luagu lidise wéibugu wasandirei lihürü wanügü.
It is as we proceed on our journey that we feel the weight of our burdens.
--Garifuna Proverb
You see several dugout canoes returning from early morning fishing in the Caribbean Sea. One of the fishermen has a deep black long dreadlocks....Some had short thick curly hair. Children ran with bare feet, dark women with bundles of wood on their heads stroll along the beach. You hear talking and laughter from the women and children. It's not English! It's not Jamaican or Creole! It's definitely not Spanish. The people look very African. Have you landed on or come upon an African settlement on this Caribbean shore of Latin America. The you are greeted with a "Buiti benafi… (gud mauning)!" YOU HAVE JUST ARRIVED IN THE GARIFUNA VILLAGE OF SEINE BIGHT - one of Belize's six homes of the Garinagu people formerly known as Black Caribs.
Here are a few interesting examples of Garifuna words:
eyeridua - to be upstart, troublesome (women's speech)
wügüri - man (men's speech)
ügü - female genitalia or the core of anything
áucha - to fish (women's speech)
áucha - to try (men's speech)
guríara - dugout-canoe (women's speech)
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