The Legacy of Mesoamerica History and Culture of a Native American Civilization, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 11 LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES OF MESOAMERICA 411

Box 11.1 Garífuna, a Language with a Complex History

One of the most unusual languages spoken in Mesoamerica is the language known as Garífuna,

or Black Carib. This language belongs to the Arawakan language family of South America, but

it is currently spoken along the Caribbean coast of Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. Before the

arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean, languages belonging to two different families, Cariban and

Arawakan, were spoken on the Caribbean Islands. The Arawakan people seem to have been res-

idents of these islands for a longer period of time, but many Arawakan populations had been con-

quered by Cariban-speaking people.

This was the case on the island of St. Vincent, in the Lesser Antilles. An older Arawakan

population had been largely overrun by Carib-speaking people. As a result of the Carib con-

quest, many or most Arawakan men were killed, but many Arawakan women survived and mar-

ried Carib men. The women’s Arawakan language (now called Garífuna) was the one that survived,

but the people speaking it came to be called Black Caribs. Certain items of alternative vocabu-

lary, stemming from Carib, are used only by men once they reach puberty.

Also on St. Vincent were a small number of European colonists and a large number of African

slaves. Substantial numbers of escaped slaves mixed with the native population of the island, and

there was intermarriage between the two groups. As a result, speakers of Garífuna have both

African and Native American ancestry.

After revolts against the British on St. Vincent, the British government made the decision to

deport all the remaining Black Carib people from St. Vincent in 1797. There were 5,080 people

shipped from St. Vincent to the island of Roatán, off the coast of Honduras. The modern Garí-

funa people are the descendants of those who were deported from St. Vincent, and there are now

tens of thousands of speakers of this language.

As a result of the unusual history of these people, a South American language spoken by

people of mixed African and Native American ancestry, Garífuna, has become part of the lan-

guage diversity that characterizes the Mesoamerican region today.

researchers have made important contributions to understanding the structures and
histories of these languages.
In addition to their colonial and modern documentation, some of the languages
have pre-Hispanic documentation in hieroglyphic records. The greatest number of
hieroglyphic texts—a few thousand of them—come from the lowland Mayan area;
and because they are so numerous, they are contributing useful information about
the history of Mayan languages and writing as well as about the cultural practices
they document. The texts appear to be in two different Mayan languages, Ch’olan
in the south and Yucatecan in the north. It is now generally agreed that a Ch’olan
language is the standard represented in texts throughout most of the lowland Mayan
area. Yucatecan was the language of the northern part of the Mayan lowlands; and
Yucatecan vocabulary and grammatical features appear in texts in this area, but so do
some traits of the Ch’olan standard. Some scholars believe that these texts are basi-
cally written in an elite-associated Ch’olan standard, with local linguistic forms some-
times slipping through; but it is also possible that they are written in the local,
Yucatecan language, with a heavy admixture of borrowed “high culture” vocabulary
such as Ch’olan ti7 y-otot(literally “mouth of (the) house”) rather than Yucatecan chi7
y-oto:ch,for the entrance to a temple.