Arawak

Arawak is an Amerindian language spoken in South America. It is a member of the Arawakan family, which includes about two dozen languages spoken by around half a million people in Central and South America. Arawakan languages are generally spoken in tropical forest regions, from the Orinoco river basin in the north to the Río de la Plata river basin in the south. Most Arawakan speakers today live in rural areas. The best-known Arawakan language is probably Taino, which was spoken in the Caribbean islands by the Taino people, who were the first Amerindians encountered by Christopher Columbus. Taino is now extinct, but it has left many loanwords in the Caribbean Creole languages. Other Arawakan languages include Garifuna, spoken in Central America, and Wayuu, spoken in Colombia and Venezuela. Arawakan languages are generally not written languages, but some effort is being made to develop writing systems for some of them. Arawakan languages are characterized by a number of shared features. They tend to have simple phonologies with few consonants and vowels. They also have a basic word order of Subject-Object-Verb. Arawakan languages are agglutinative, meaning that they tend to use suffixes to add meaning to words. The Arawakan language family is believed to be related to the Maipuran language family, which includes languages spoken in the Amazon basin. The two families are thought to have split about 2,500 years ago.