The Ta-Arawakan languages, also known as Ta-Maipurean and Caribbean, are the Indigenous

Arawakan Arawakan (''Arahuacan, Maipuran Arawakan, "mainstream" Arawakan, Arawakan proper''), also known as Maipurean (also ''Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúre''), is a language family that developed among ancient Indigenous peoples in South America. Branch ...

languages of the

Caribbean Sea The Caribbean Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere, located south of the Gulf of Mexico and southwest of the Sargasso Sea. It is bounded by the Greater Antilles to the north from Cuba ...

coasts of Central and South America. They are distinguished by the first person pronominal prefix ''ta-,'' as opposed to common Arawakan ''na-.''

Languages

Kaufman (1994) provides the following subclassification: * Caribbean Arawakan **

Taíno The Taíno are the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, Indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles and surrounding islands. At the time of European contact in the late 15th century, they were the principal inhabitants of most of what is now The ...

** Guajiro (Wahiro) ***

Wayuu The Wayuu (also Wayu, Wayú, Guajiro, Wahiro) are an Indigenous ethnic group of the Guajira Peninsula in northernmost Colombia and northwest Venezuela. The Wayuu language is part of the Arawakan language family. Throughout their history, they ...

(Guajiro, Wahiro) *** Paraujano (Parauhano, Añun) *** Arawák (Lokono) ** Iñeri (Inyeri) *** Kalhíphona (

Island Carib The Kalinago, also called Island Caribs or simply Caribs, are an Indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. They may have been related to the Mainland Caribs (Kalina) of South America, but they spoke an unrelated language know ...

, modern

Garífuna The Garifuna people ( or ; pl. Garínagu in Garifuna language, Garifuna) are a people of mixed free African people, African and Indigenous people of the Americas, Amerindian ancestry that originated in the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent (An ...

or Black Carib) Aikhenvald adds Shebayo, which Kaufman had left unclassified, and removes Iñeri from Ta-Arawakan proper: * Caribbean Arawakan ** Iñeri *** Kalhíphona ** Ta-Arawakan ***

***

*** Parauhano *** Arawák *** Shebayo ***

Caquetio Caquetío are natives of northwestern Venezuela, living along the shores of Lake Maracaibo at the time of the Spanish conquest. They moved inland to avoid enslavement by the Spaniards, while their numbers were drastically affected by colonia ...

Proto-language

Reconstructions of Proto-Lokono-Guajiro proposed by Captain (1991):Captain, D. (1991

005 ''005'' (pronounced "''double-o five''") is a 1981 arcade video game by Sega. They advertised it as the first of their RasterScan Convert-a-Game series, designed so that it could be changed into another game in minutes "at a substantial savings. ...

. Proto-Lokono-Guajiro. ''Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Etnolingüísticos'', 10:137-172. :

References

{{Arawakan languages Arawakan languages Languages of the Caribbean Languages of Central America Languages of Belize Languages of Honduras Languages of Guatemala