The Cariban languages are a family of languages Indigenous to north-eastern South America. They are widespread across northernmost South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes, and they are also spoken in small pockets of central Brazil. The languages of the Cariban family are relatively closely related. There are about three dozen, but most are spoken only by a few hundred people. Macushi is the only language among them with numerous speakers, estimated at 30,000. The Cariban family is well known among linguists partly because one language in the family—Hixkaryana—has a default word order of object–verb–subject. Prior to their discovery of this, linguists presumed that this order did not exist in any spoken natural language.
Genetic relations
The Cariban languages share irregular morphology with the Jê and Tupian families. Ribeiro connects them all in a Je–Tupi–Carib family. Meira, Gildea, & Hoff (2010) note that likely morphemes in proto-Tupian and proto-Cariban are good candidates for being cognates, but that work so far is insufficient to make definitive statements.
Extensive lexical similarities between Cariban and various Macro-Jê languages suggest that Cariban languages had originated in the Lower Amazon region (rather than in the Guiana Highlands). There they were in contact with early forms of Macro-Jê languages, which were likely spoken in an area between the Parecis Plateau and upper Araguaia River.[1]:425
Family division
The Cariban languages are closely related. In many cases where one of the languages is more distinct, this is due to influence from neighboring languages rather than an indication that it is not closely related. According to Kaufman (2007), "Except for Opon, Yukpa, Pimenteira and Palmela (and possibly Panare), the Cariban languages are not very diverse phonologically and lexically (though more so than Romance, for example)."[2]
Previous classifications
Good data had been collected on most Cariban languages by c.2000; classifications prior to that time (including Kaufman 2007, which relies on Kaufman 1994) are unreliable.
Several such classifications have been published; the one shown here, by Derbyshire (1999) divides Cariban into seven branches. A traditional geographic classification into northern and southern branches is cross referenced with (N) or (S) after each language.[3]
The extinct Patagón de Perico language of northern Peru also appears to have been a Cariban language, perhaps close to Carijona. Yao is so poorly attested that Gildea believes it may never be classified.
Loukotka (1968)
Below is a full list of Cariban language varieties listed by Loukotka (1968), including names of unattested varieties.[4]
Meira (2006)
Preliminary internal classification of the Cariban languages according to Sérgio Meira (2006):[10]:169
As of Gildea (2012), there had not yet been time to fully reclassify the Cariban languages based on the new data. The list here is therefore tentative, though an improvement over the one above; the most secure branches are listed first, and only two of the extinct languages are addressed.[12]
Meira, Birchall & Chousou-Polydouri (2015) conclude that the Proto-Cariban homeland was located north of the Amazon River, and that there is no evidence for a northward migration from the south, as previously proposed by Rodrigues (1985).[14] Rather there were two southern migrations (Pekodian and Nahukwa into the Upper Xingu).
Camargo, E. (2002). Léxico bilingüe aparai – português / português – aparai. (Languages of the World: Dictionaries, 28.). München: Lincom Europa.
Courtz, H. (2008). A Carib Grammar and Dictionary. Toronto: Magoria Books.
Gildea, S. Payne, D. (2007). Is Greenberg's “Macro-Carib” viable? Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi Ciências Humanas, 2:19–72.
Girard, V. (1971a). Proto-Carib phonology. Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley. (Doctoral dissertation).
Mattei-Müller, M. (1994). Diccionario ilustrado Panare-Español con índice español-panare. Caracas: Comisión Nacional Quinto Centenario.
Pet. W. J. A. (1987). Lokono Dian: the Arawak Language of Suriname: A Sketch of its Grammatical Structure and Lexicon. Ithaca: Cornell University. (Doctoral dissertation).
Puig, M. M. P. (1944). Diccionario de la Lengua Caribe Cuna. Panamá: La Estrella de Panamá.
Vitorino, M. M. (1991). Dicionário bilíngüe Wai-Wai/Português, Português/Wai-Wai. Boa Vista: Missão Evangélica da Amazônia.
References
123Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho De Valhery. 2016. Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Brasília.
↑Kaufman, Terrence. 2007. "South America". In: R. E. Asher and Christopher Moseley (eds.), Atlas of the World’s Languages (2nd edition), 59–94. London: Routledge.
↑Desmond Derbyshire, 1999. "Carib". In Dixon & Aikhenvald, eds., The Amazonian Languages. CUP.
↑Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center.
↑Migliazza, Ernest C. (1985-12-31), "1. Languages of the Orinoco-Amazon Region: Current Status", in Klein, Harriet E. Manelis; Stark, Louisa R. (eds.), South American Indian Languages, University of Texas Press, pp.15–139, doi:10.7560/775923-002, ISBN978-1-4773-0025-1, retrieved 2025-09-30
↑Mayer, Alcuin (1951). "Lendas Macuxís". Journal de la société des américanistes. 40 (1): 67–87. doi:10.3406/jsa.1951.2540.
↑Gumilla, Joseph. 1745. El Orinoco ilustrado, y defendido: Historia natural, civil, y geographica de este gran Rio, y de sus caudalosas vertientes. 2nd ed., in 2 pts. Madrid. (New ed., Barcelona, 1791.)
↑"Breve compendio de nombres substantivos y adjetivos, o términos más comunes para entender la lengua pariagoto · Real Biblioteca · Real Biblioteca Digital". rbdigital.realbiblioteca.es. Retrieved 2026-06-20.
↑Meira, Sérgio. 2006. A família lingüística Caribe (Karíb). Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas v.3, n.1/2, p.157-174. Brasília: FUNAI. (PDF)
↑Carvalho, Fernando O. de (2020). Tocantins Apiaká, Parirí and Yarumá as Members of the Pekodian Branch (Cariban). Revista Brasileira de Línguas Indígenas – RBLI. Macapá, v. 3, n. 1, p. 85-93, 2020.
12Gildea, Spike. 2012. "Linguistic studies in the Cariban family", in Campbell & Grondona, eds, The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
↑Meira S, Birchall J, Chousou-Polydouri S. 2015. A character-based internal classification of the Cariban family. Talk presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguisticae Europaea, Leiden, Netherlands, Sept. 4.
↑Rodrigues, Aryon. 1985. Evidence for Tupi-Carib relationships. In South American Indian Languages: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. HE Manelis Klein, LR Stark, pp. 371–404. Austin: University of Texas Press.
↑Gildea, S. & Payne, D. (2007). Is Greenberg's "Macro-Carib" viable? In Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas, Belém, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 19–72. Accessed from DiACL, 9 February 2020.
↑Gildea, S. (2012). Linguistic studies in the Cariban family. In Campbell, L. & Grondona, V. (eds.), The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide. 441–494, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Accessed from DiACLArchived 2020-06-26 at the Wayback Machine, 9 February 2020.
External links
Etnolinguistica.Org: online resources on native South American languages
Ka'lina (Carib) Vocabulary List (from the World Loanword Database)
Categories:
Cariban languages
Language families
Indigenous languages of the South American Northeast
