Garifuna
The Garifuna language is spoken mainly in Honduras and Belize with much smaller numbers of speakers in Nicaragua and Guatemala. The history of the Garifuna people and their language is exceedingly unique. They are the descendants of West Africans who were transported to South America as slaves but who escaped in a fortuitous shipwreck near the island of St. Vincent. Having arrived at St. Vincent, they intermarried with local indigenous Arawakan and Carib tribes adopting many elements from their culture such as the cultivation of cassava and its related technology, singing styles, and, perhaps most interestingly, their language. Garifuna is clearly an Arawakan language in its morphology and syntax but its vocabulary has also been influenced by contact with the Carib, French and English. Today, nearly all Garifuna are bilingual in Spanish or English.
The Garifuna are a maritime people and through their work on ships they have been able to migrate to the United States in large numbers. Remarkably, it is thought that over a third of all Garifuna people now currently reside in New York.
We are currently undertaking work with the local Garifuna community to document forms of natural speech as well as the more archaic language of traditional songs as a basis for codifying the highly complex morphosyntax in the form of a pedagogical grammar.
Two of our primary native speaker collaborators are Loreida Guity (Honduras) and Alex Colon (Belize). The brief autobiographical narrative below was provided by Loreida.
