Cariban

The Cariban family holds some three dozen closely related languages across northern South America, from the Amazon estuary and the Guiana coast to the Colombian Andes. Linguists place the Proto-Cariban homeland north of the lower Amazon, where ancient contact with Macro-Je languages left a shared vocabulary.

Later migrations carried the Pemon into the Gran Sabana, the Yukpa into the Perija hills, and the Kalina, or mainland Caribs, along the coast between the Amazon and the Orinoco. Before 1492 the Kalina were pressing eastward against Arawakan-speaking neighbours, and Columbus first recorded their name as Caribe, a word the Spanish associated with hostile peoples and cannibalism. Hixkaryana became known among linguists for its object-verb-subject word order.