History and language of Garifona people

There are more than 50,000 Garifona people inhabiting the coast of Honduras, Guatemala and Belice.

Theu speak a very special language called "Garifuna" or "Karif" which is widely spoken in villages of the western part of the northern coast of Central America.

It is a member of the Arawakan languages but an atypical one since it is spoken outside of the Arawakan language area, which is otherwise confined to the northern parts of South America, and because it contains an unusually high number of loanwords from both Carib languages and a number of European languages because of an extremely tumultuous past involving warfare, migration and colonization.

The language was once confined to the Antillean islands of St Vincent and Dominicam but its speakers, the Garifuna people, were deported en masse by the British in 1797 to the north coast of Honduras where the language and Garifuna people have since spread along the coast south to Nicaragua and north to Guatemala and Belize.

Parts of Garifuna vocabulary are split between men's speech and women's speech, and some concepts have two words to express them, one for women and one for men. Moreover, the terms used by men are generally loanwords from Carib while those used by women are Arawak,

The Garifuna language was declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2008 along with Garifuna music and dance.