What Language Do the Garifuna People of Belize Speak?

July 20, 2024
by belizehubstaff +

The Garifuna are one of several unique cultures to call Belize their home, which they often do in their own manner of speaking. While English is the official language of the country, the Garifuna are also speakers of their own language and this article is all about giving a basic overview of this tongue that used to be known as “Black Carib.”

Garifuna, the language, is an Arawakan tongue spoken by nearly 200,000 individuals living within the Central American countries of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, as well as by some individuals who emigrated to the United States of America.

An Arawakan language is any language spoken by the indigenous peoples of South America; the high prevalence of speakers among Central American countries is a somewhat recent event. The Garifuna people, and their language, emerged after African slaves had relations with the Caribs of St. Vincent and Dominica.

These new people, the Garifuna, were deported by the British in 1797 and their language shot off from a foundation of the Island Carib women’s language from the Lesser Antilles. St. Vincent and Dominica were subsequently invaded by Caribs whose ancestry came from the Galibi, a Brazilian Cariban group, creating French Guiana.

The Garifuna tongue stayed basically unchanged from how an aboriginal Arawakan might speak, though the male expressions that Carib forms were often changed out for Arawakan analogs, likely cribbing from old Carib pidgin.

The female Arawakan language has remained relatively static yet the male tweaks to the Garifuna language have mostly been lost to time, yielding the current situation where Garifuna can be considered an Arawakan language despite being called something with obvious Cariban ties.

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