: The position of the Guianese Arawak/Lokono in the Arawakan family

Abstract

The Arawakan languages are an indigenous language family of South America and the Caribbean. It is the largest family in the Americas with the respect to number of languages and covers the widest geographical area of any language group in Latin America. The languages called Arawakan or Maipuran were initially recognized as a separate group in the eighteenth century. Originally the name Arawak was used for a powerful tribe in Guyana, Netherlands Antilles, Venezuela, Suriname and the French Overseas Department of Guiana. Lokono is the self denomination of this group. Internal classification within the Amerindian language families remains controversial, since there are considerable difficulties in distinguishing genealogical relatedness from areal features. However it is possible to assess, considering lexicon and typological common properties such as grammatical relations and morphological alignment that its closest relatives among the Arawakan languages are the Goahiro (or Wayuunaiki) language, spoken in Venezuela and Colombia and the Venezuelan Parauhano language. Despite its name, the Island Carib language was an Arawakan language. Its derived modern language Garifuna. Together with Arawak/Lokono, Goahiro and Parauhano, it is said to form the Northern subgroup of the Arawakan family