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53-522: In the 16th century, Cariban peoples expanded into the Lesser Antilles . There they killed or displaced, and also mixed with the Arawak peoples who already inhabited the islands. The resulting language— Kalhíphona or Island Carib —was Carib in name but largely Arawak in substance. The Carib male conquerors took Arawak women as wives, and the latter passed on their own language on to the children. For

106-747: A component of compression. Geologically, the Lesser Antilles island arc stretches from Grenada in the south to Anguilla in the north. The Virgin Islands and Sombrero Island are geologically part of the Greater Antilles, while Trinidad is part of South America and Tobago is the remainder of a separate island arc. The Leeward Antilles are also a separate island arc, which is accreting to South America. The Lesser Antilles are divided into eight independent nations and numerous dependent and non-sovereign states (which are politically associated with

159-486: A family tree, and therefore no known Urheimat . An example is the Basque language of Northern Spain and southwest France. Nevertheless, it is a scientific fact that all languages evolve. An unknown Urheimat may still be hypothesized, such as that for a Proto-Basque , and may be supported by archaeological and historical evidence. Sometimes relatives are found for a language originally believed to be an isolate. An example

212-464: A given language family implies a purely genealogical view of the development of languages. This assumption is often reasonable and useful, but it is by no means a logical necessity, as languages are well known to be susceptible to areal change such as substrate or superstrate influence. Over a sufficient period of time, in the absence of evidence of intermediary steps in the process, it may be impossible to observe linkages between languages that have

265-621: A handful of words. Dominica is the only island in the eastern Caribbean to retain some of its pre-Columbian population, descendants of the Carib Indians, about 3,000 of whom live on the island's east coast. 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

318-486: A linguistic homeland (e.g. Isidore Dyen 's proposal for New Guinea as the center of dispersal of the Austronesian languages ). The linguistic migration theory has its limits because it only works when linguistic diversity evolves continuously without major disruptions. Its results can be distorted e.g. when this diversity is wiped out by more recent migrations. The concept of a (single, identifiable) "homeland" of

371-516: A shared Urheimat: given enough time, natural language change will obliterate any meaningful linguistic evidence of a common genetic source. This general concern is a manifestation of the larger issue of "time depth" in historical linguistics. For example, the languages of the New World are believed to be descended from a relatively "rapid" peopling of the Americas (relative to the duration of

424-490: A time, Arawak was spoken by women and children and Carib by adult men, but as each generation of Carib-Arawak boys reached adulthood, they acquired less Carib until only basic vocabulary and a few grammatical elements were left. That form of Island Carib became extinct in the Lesser Antilles in the 1920s, but it survives as Garífuna , or "Black Carib," in Central America . The gender distinction has dwindled to only

477-455: Is almost completely detached from linguistic reconstruction, instead surrounding questions of phonology and the origin of speech . Time depths involved in the deep prehistory of all the world's extant languages are of the order of at least 100,000 years. The concept of an Urheimat only applies to populations speaking a proto-language defined by the tree model . This is not always the case. For example, in places where language families meet,

530-453: Is insufficient to make definitive statements. Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Guato , Kawapana , Nambikwara , Taruma , Warao , Arawak , Bororo , Jeoromitxi , Karaja , Rikbaktsa , and Tupi language families due to contact. Extensive lexical similarities between Cariban and various Macro-Jê languages suggest that Cariban languages had originated in

583-532: 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)." Good data has been collected around ca. 2000 on most Cariban languages; classifications prior to that time (including Kaufman 2007, which relies on the earlier work) are unreliable. Several such classifications have been published;

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636-612: Is sparse, with sites in Tobago , Barbados , and Martinique yielding potential Archaic Age artifacts. Factors like local tectonic activity and hurricanes or other storms have likely distorted the archaeological evidence in these regions. Entire islands may now be submerged. Severe erosion, landslides, and volcanic eruptions are fairly common and may contribute to the preservation of archaeological sites. Three migration scenarios have been proposed. First, Archaic Age communities from South America reached Trinidad, Tobago, and Barbados. Second,

689-633: Is the Etruscan language , which, even though only partially understood, is believed to be related to the Rhaetic language and to the Lemnian language . A single family may be an isolate. In the case of the non-Austronesian indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea and the indigenous languages of Australia, there is no published linguistic hypothesis supported by any evidence that these languages have links to any other families. Nevertheless, an unknown Urheimat

742-607: 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 . 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

795-601: The Ortoiroid series, divided into the Banwarian (5000-2500 BC) and Ortoiran (1500-300 BC) subseries. During the Late Archaic Age, wild plant foods became more significant, with evidence of early plant management, including crops such as maize , sweet potatoes , achira, and chili peppers had been imported and cultivated from the continent. The archaeological record for the rest of the southern Lesser Antilles

848-468: The Upper Xingu ). Internal classification by Jolkesky (2016): ( † = extinct) Below is a full list of Cariban language varieties listed by Loukotka (1968), including names of unattested varieties. Western languages : Caraib / Calinago / Karib – language spoken by the insular and continental Caraibes, with many dialects: Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for

901-711: The archipelago of the Virgin Islands , swings southeast through the Leeward and Windward Islands towards South America , and turns westward through the Leeward Antilles along the Venezuelan coast . Most of them are part of a long, partially volcanic island arc between the Greater Antilles to the north-west and the continent of South America. The islands of the Lesser Antilles form

954-415: The homeland or Urheimat ( / ˈ ʊər h aɪ m ɑː t / OOR -hye-maht , from German ur - 'original' and Heimat 'home') of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages . A proto-language is the reconstructed or historically-attested parent language of a group of languages that are genetically related . Depending on

1007-459: The "Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique". Margarita Island in present-day Venezuela was discovered on 15 August 1498 during Columbus' third voyage. On that trip the Admiral would also discover the mainland, Venezuela. On that August day, Columbus spotted three islands, two of them small, low and arid (the present day Coche and Cubagua), The province of Trinidad was created in the 16th century by

1060-720: The ABC islands comprise the Dutch Caribbean , of which the BES islands are not direct Kingdom constituents but subsumed with the country of the Netherlands . Physiographically , these continental islands are not part of the volcanic Windward Islands arc, although sometimes grouped with them culturally and politically. Disputed territories administered by Guyana . Disputed territories administered by Colombia . Linguistic homeland In historical linguistics ,

1113-677: The Afroasiatic-speaking Daasanach have been observed to be closely related to each other but genetically distinct from neighboring Afroasiatic-speaking populations. This is a reflection of the fact that the Daasanach, like the Nyangatom, originally spoke a Nilo-Saharan language, with the ancestral Daasanach later adopting an Afroasiatic language around the 19th century. Creole languages are hybrids of languages that are sometimes unrelated. Similarities arise from

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1166-671: The Atlantic Plate under the Caribbean Plate in the Lesser Antilles subduction zone . This process is ongoing and is responsible not only for many of the islands, but also for volcanic and earthquake activity in the region. The islands along the South American coast are largely the result of the interaction of the South American Plate and the Caribbean Plate which is mainly strike-slip , but includes

1219-694: The Cariban (Karaib) languages. Proto-Cariban phonology according to Gildea (2012): Proto-Cariban reconstructions by Gildea (2007, 2012): Lesser Antilles The Lesser Antilles is a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea , forming part of the West Indies in Caribbean region of the Americas . They are distinguished from the larger islands of the Greater Antilles to the west. They form an arc which begins east of Puerto Rico at

1272-403: The Cariban languages according to Sérgio Meira (2006): 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. Meira, Birchall & Chousou-Polydouri (2015) give

1325-672: The Caribbean, who established the first permanent French colony, Saint-Pierre, on the island of Martinique in 1635. Belain sailed to the Caribbean in 1625, hoping to establish a French settlement on the island of St Christopher ( St Kitts ). In 1626 the French under Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc began to take an interest in Guadeloupe, driving out the Spanish colonists. Martinique was mapped by Columbus in 1493, but Spain had little interest in

1378-575: The Georgian-era capital of Montserrat, Plymouth. Between 1995 and 2000, two-thirds of the island's population was forced to flee, mainly to the UK, leaving less than 1200 people on the island in 1997 (rising to almost 5000 by 2016). The two official French overseas departments are Guadeloupe and Martinique. St. Martin and St. Barthélemy, formerly part of the department of Guadeloupe, have had a separate status as overseas entities since 2007. The islands of

1431-607: The Lesser Antilles are divided into three groups: the Windward Islands in the south, the Leeward Islands in the north, and the Leeward Antilles in the west. The Windward Islands are so called because they were more windward to sailing ships arriving in the New World than the Leeward Islands, given that the prevailing trade winds blow east to west. The trans-Atlantic currents and winds that provided

1484-730: The Spanish, and its capital was San José de Oruña. But during the Napoleonic Wars, in February 1797, a British force began occupying the territory. And in 1802 Spain recognized the British sovereignty. In 1917 the United States bought the Danish Virgin Islands . Most of the British colonies became independent states, the islands of the Lesser Antilles belonging to Venezuela were divided into 2 different entities

1537-815: The State of Nueva Esparta and the Federal Dependencies (1938). In 1986 Aruba seceded from the Netherlands Antilles , officially becoming a country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands . In 2010 the rest of the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved to form smaller entities. On July 18, 1995, the previously dormant Soufrière Hills volcano on the southern part of the island of Montserrat became active. The eruptions destroyed

1590-667: The United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and the United States). Over one third of the total area and population of the Lesser Antilles lies within Trinidad and Tobago , a sovereign nation comprising the two southernmost islands of the Windward Island chain. Several islands off the north coast of Venezuela and politically part of that country are also considered part of the Lesser Antilles. These are listed in

1643-614: The Upper Paleolithic) within a few millennia (roughly between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago), but their genetic relationship has become completely obscured over the more than ten millennia which have passed between their separation and their first written record in the early modern period. Similarly, the Australian Aboriginal languages are divided into some 28 families and isolates for which no genetic relationship can be shown. The Urheimaten reconstructed using

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1696-427: The age of the language family under consideration, its homeland may be known with near-certainty (in the case of historical or near-historical migrations) or it may be very uncertain (in the case of deep prehistory). Next to internal linguistic evidence, the reconstruction of a prehistoric homeland makes use of a variety of disciplines, including archaeology and archaeogenetics . There are several methods to determine

1749-622: The boundary set between them is known as the " poison arrow curtain" for the Kalinago's favoured weapon for fending off Europeans that came to conquer the islands in the 16th century. The earliest Archaic Age habitation is evidenced at sites like St. John and Banwari Trace in Trinidad , dating between 7700 and 6100 B.P. Artifacts from this period include stone and bone tools used for hunting and fishing. A total of 29 Archaic Age sites have been identified in Trinidad and Tobago, associated with

1802-548: The consumption of marine species and variety of shell and coral tools. Each site showed diverse adaptations to locally available resources and/or activity patterns. Archaeological findings, including Huecoid and Saladoid pottery , provide radiocarbon dates for Early Ceramic Age sites, pointing to an initial sphere of interaction between coastal South America and the northern Lesser Antilles that started around 400–200 BC. The discovery of Saladoid pottery in Puerto Rico and

1855-459: The creole formation process, rather than from genetic descent. For example, a creole language may lack significant inflectional morphology, lack tone on monosyllabic words, or lack semantically opaque word formation, even if these features are found in all of the parent languages of the languages from which the creole was formed. Some languages are language isolates . That is to say, they have no well accepted language family connection, no nodes in

1908-478: The distribution of flora and fauna. Another method is based on the linguistic migration theory (first proposed by Edward Sapir ), which states that the most likely candidate for the last homeland of a language family can be located in the area of its highest linguistic diversity. This presupposes an established view about the internal subgrouping of the language family. Different assumptions about high-order subgrouping can thus lead to very divergent proposals for

1961-564: The early 20th century, the Nostratic theory still receives serious consideration, but it is by no means generally accepted. The more recent and more speculative "Borean" hypothesis attempts to unite Nostratic with Dené–Caucasian and Austric , in a "mega-phylum" that would unite most languages of Eurasia, with a time depth going back to the Last Glacial Maximum. The argument surrounding the " Proto-Human language ", finally,

2014-711: The eastern boundary of the Caribbean Sea where it meets the Atlantic Ocean . Together, the Lesser Antilles and the Greater Antilles make up the Antilles . The Lesser and Greater Antilles, together with the Lucayan Archipelago , are collectively known as the Caribbean islands or West Indies . The islands were dominantly Kalinago compared to the Greater Antilles which was settled by the Taíno ,

2067-604: The fastest route across the ocean brought these ships to the rough dividing line between the Windward and Leeward Islands. The Leeward Antilles consist of the Dutch ABC islands just off the coast of Venezuela , plus a group of Venezuelan islands. The Lesser Antilles more or less coincide with the outer cliff of the Caribbean Plate . Many of the islands were formed as a result of the subduction of oceanic crust of

2120-570: The following phylogenetic tree of Cariban, based on a computational phylogenetic analysis of 100-item Swadesh lists . 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). Rather there were two southern migrations ( Pekodian and Nahukwa into

2173-418: The homeland of a given language family. One method is based on the vocabulary that can be reconstructed for the proto-language. This vocabulary – especially terms for flora and fauna – can provide clues for the geographical and ecological environment in which the proto-language was spoken. An estimate for the time-depth of the proto-language is necessary in order to account for prehistorical changes in climate and

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2226-486: The land of the island they called Marigalante. They then anchored next to the island they called Guadeloupe. Later they visited Montserrat, Antigua and San Cristobal. They then crossed the archipelago of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. Over the next centuries, the Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish and English fought over several of the islands. Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc was a French merchant and adventurer in

2279-526: The methods of comparative linguistics typically estimate separation times dating to the Neolithic or later. It is undisputed that fully developed languages were present throughout the Upper Paleolithic , and possibly into the deep Middle Paleolithic (see origin of language , behavioral modernity ). These languages would have spread with the early human migrations of the first "peopling of

2332-649: The most heavily populated during the Archaic Age. Notably, all known Archaic Age sites are in the northern islands, with no evidence in the Windward Islands south of Guadeloupe . Trinidad, Tobago, and Barbados are exceptions, likely colonized separately from South America. Sites in the Lesser Antilles were established on small islands and in coastal seetings ; most habitations were temporary and small, suggesting annual mobility for resource procurement. Despite similarities, each site displayed differences in

2385-441: The northern Lesser Antilles is understood as a result of exploratory activities, cultural exchanges, and gradual migrations from the mainland during the Archaic Age. This process involved the interaction of local communities with established insular societies, creating a web of dynamic social relationships. However, debates and controversies has occurred over conflicting stratigraphic data, radiocarbon dates, and stylistic difference of

2438-461: 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. 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. Preliminary internal classification of

2491-478: The potteries. The Spanish were the first Europeans to arrive on the islands with the arrival of Christopher Columbus . In 1493, on his second voyage, Columbus reached the coast of the Caribbean Sea, where he sailed to discover several islands of the Lesser Antilles archipelago. He called the first island he discovered on this trip the Deseada. The Spanish claimed the island of Dominica and took solemn possession on

2544-597: The prehistoric spread of the world's major linguistic families seem to reflect the expansion of population cores during the Mesolithic followed by the Neolithic Revolution . The Nostratic theory is the best-known attempt to expand the deep prehistory of the main language families of Eurasia (excepting Sino-Tibetan and the languages of Southeast Asia) to the beginning of the Holocene . First proposed in

2597-637: The relationship between a group that speaks a language and the Urheimat for that language is complicated by "processes of migration, language shift and group absorption are documented by linguists and ethnographers" in groups that are themselves "transient and plastic." Thus, in the contact area in western Ethiopia between languages belonging to the Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic families, the Nilo-Saharan-speaking Nyangatom and

2650-521: The section below. The main Lesser Antilles are (from north to south to west): Islands north of the Venezuelan coast (from west to east): Physiographically , these are continental islands not part of the volcanic Windward Islands arc. However, based on proximity, these islands are sometimes grouped with the Windward Islands culturally and politically. These three form the SSS islands that with

2703-693: The southern Lesser Antilles (Windward Islands) were bypassed by early settlers, with migration directly to the northern islands. Third, technological diffusion occurred without significant population movement from northeastern South America. Chronometric data divide the Archaic Age in the northern Lesser Antilles into three phases: Early Archaic Age (3300–2600 BC), Middle Archaic Age (2600–800 BC), and Late Archaic Age (800 BC–AD 100). Coastal areas were favored for settlement, particularly for their proximity to marine resources and flint quarries. Material culture showing reliance on seafood (fish and mollusks) and terrestrial animals. Antigua and St. Martin seem to be

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2756-412: The territory. Christopher Columbus landed on 15 June 1502 after 21 days of crossing with trade winds, his fastest oceanic journey. On 15 September 1635, Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc, the French governor of the island of San Cristóbal, landed in the port of San Pedro with 80–150 French settlers after being expelled from San Cristóbal by the English. D'Esnambuc claimed Martinique for the French King Louis XIII and

2809-404: The world", but they are no longer amenable to linguistic reconstruction. The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) has imposed linguistic separation lasting several millennia on many Upper Paleolithic populations in Eurasia, as they were forced to retreat into " refugia " before the advancing ice sheets. After the end of the LGM, Mesolithic populations of the Holocene again became more mobile, and most of

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