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Cariban languages

Cariban languages
Large family of South American Indian languages.

It has an estimated 43 members; nearly half are now extinct, and most of the remainder have very few speakers. Most Cariban languages are spoken in southern Venezuela, the Guianas, and Brazil north of the Amazon, though several have strayed far from this area. Cariban incursions into the mainly Arawakan-speaking Antilles at the time of Columbus provided European languages with the words Carib (hence, Caribbean) and cannibal, both perhaps from a proto-Cariban form meaning "Indian, person."

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      a group of South American Indian languages that were spoken before the Spanish conquest from what is now the Greater Antilles to the central Mato Grosso in Brazil; most of the languages, however, were spoken north of the Amazon River in what is now northern Brazil, the inland areas of the Guianas and Venezuela, and lowland Colombia. West Indian Cariban is extinct, and the languages of the group have undergone a drastic decline in the other areas.

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Universalium. 2010.

  
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