Cariban languages
| Cariban | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Mostly within north-central South America, with extensions in the southern Caribbean and in Central America. |
| Linguistic classification | Je–Tupi–Carib?
|
| Subdivisions |
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| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | cari1283 |
Present location of Cariban languages, c. 2000, and probable extent in the 16th century. | |
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.