Galibi Carib

Galibi Carib (autonymously Kari'na, also known as Kalinha or Karina) is the type-language for the entire Cariban language family — the Spanish term "caribe" derived from the Carib autonym, and gave rise to both "Caribbean" (the geographic region) and "cannibal" (Carib was a feared warrior people in colonial Spanish accounts). The Galibi Carib language is spoken by around 7,000 people across Suriname, French Guiana, Venezuela, Guyana, and northern Brazil. The Carib peoples were the dominant indigenous group of the southern Caribbean and northern South American coast at the time of European contact in the 1490s, having migrated north from the Amazon basin to displace the earlier Arawak peoples. The Carib language was a lingua franca of the southern Caribbean before being largely replaced by colonial languages, with surviving Carib speech communities now concentrated along the Atlantic coast of the Guianas and the Lesser Antilles (where Carib has effectively been replaced by Garifuna cab — descended from a Carib-Arawak-Spanish-French creole that developed on St. Vincent).

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