Taíno language

Taíno is an extinct Arawakan language that was spoken by the Taíno people of the Caribbean. At the time of Spanish contact, it was the most common language throughout the Caribbean. Classic Taíno (Taíno proper) was the native language of the Taíno tribes living in the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, the Turks and Caicos Islands, most of Hispaniola, and eastern Cuba. The Ciboney dialect is essentially unattested, but colonial sources suggest it was very similar to Classic Taíno, and was spoken in the westernmost areas of Hispaniola, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and most of Cuba.

Taíno
Native to	Bahamas, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos, Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Anguilla
Ethnicity	Taíno, Ciboney, Lucayan, Yamaye
Extinct	19th century
Language family	Arawakan Northern Ta-Arawakan Taíno
Dialects	Classic Taíno Ciboney
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tnq
Linguist List	tnq.html
Glottolog	tain1254
Taíno dialects, among other Pre-Columbian languages of the Antilles   Ciboney Taíno   Classic Taíno
Taíno is an Extinct language according to the criteria of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

By the late 15th century, Taíno had displaced earlier languages, except in western Cuba and pockets in Hispaniola. As the Taíno culture declined during Spanish colonization, the language was replaced by Spanish and other European languages, such as English and French. It is believed to have been extinct within 100 years of contact, but possibly continued to be spoken in isolated pockets in the Caribbean until the 19th century. As the first Indigenous language encountered by Europeans in the Americas, it was a major source of new words borrowed into European languages.

Dialects

Granberry & Vescelius (2004) distinguish two dialects, one on Hispaniola and further east, and the other on Hispaniola and further west.

• Classic (Eastern) Taíno, spoken in Classic Taíno and Eastern Taíno cultural areas. These were the Lesser Antilles north of Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, central Hispaniola, and the Turks & Caicos (from an expansion in c. 1200). Classic Taíno was expanding into eastern and even central Cuba at the time of the Spanish Conquest, perhaps from people fleeing the Spanish in Hispaniola.
• Ciboney (Western) Taíno, spoken in Ciboney and Lucayan cultural areas. These were most of Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas.

Columbus wrote that "...from Bahama to Cuba, Boriquen to Jamaica, the same language was spoken in various slight dialects, but understood by all."

Phonology

The Taíno language was not written. The Taínos used petroglyphs, but there has been little research in the area. The following phonemes are reconstructed from Spanish records:

Reconstructed Taíno consonants

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t		k (c/qu)
	voiced	b	d (d/r)
Fricative			s (s/z)			h (h/j/g/x)
Nasal		m	n
Approximant		w (gu/gü/hu)	l	j (i/y)

There was also a flap [ɾ], which appears to have been an allophone of /d/. The /d/ realization occurred at the beginning of a word and the /ɾ/ realization occurred between vowels.

Some Spanish writers used the letter ⟨x⟩ in their transcriptions, which could represent /h/, /s/ or /ʃ/ in the Spanish orthography of their day.

Reconstructed Taíno vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		[u]
Mid	e (ei) ɛ (e)		o
Open		a

A distinction between /ɛ/ and /e/ is suggested by Spanish transcriptions of e vs ei/ey, as in ceiba "ceiba". The /e/ is written ei or final é in modern reconstructions. There was also a high back vowel [u], which was often interchangeable with /o/ and may have been an allophone.

There was a parallel set of nasal vowels. The nasal vowels /ĩ/ and /ũ/ were rare.

Consonant clusters were not permitted in the onset of syllables. The only consonant permitted at the end of a syllable or word in most cases was /s/. One exception was the suffix -(e)l, which indicated the masculine gender, as in warokoel "our grandfather". Some words are recorded as ending in x, which may have represented a word-final /h/ sound.

In general, stress was predictable and fell on the penultimate syllable of a word, unless the word ended in /e/, /i/ or a nasal vowel, in which case it fell on the final syllable.

Grammar

Taíno is not well attested. However, from what can be gathered, nouns appear to have had noun-class suffixes, as in other Arawakan languages. Attested Taíno possessive prefixes are da- 'my', wa- 'our', li- 'his' (sometimes with a different vowel), and to-, tu- 'her'.

Recorded conjugated verbs include daka ("I am"), waibá ("we go" or "let us go"), warikẽ ("we see"), kãma ("hear", imperative), ahiyakawo ("speak to us") and makabuka ("it is not important").

Verb-designating affixes were a-, ka-, -a, -ka, -nV in which "V" was an unknown or changeable vowel. This suggests that, like many other Arawakan languages, verbal conjugation for a subject resembled the possessive prefixes on nouns. The negating prefix was ma- and the attributive prefix was ka-. Hence makabuka meant "it is not important". The buka element has been compared to the Kalinago suffix -bouca which designates the past tense. Hence, makabuka can be interpreted as meaning "it has no past". However, the word can also be compared to the Kalinago verb aboúcacha meaning "to scare". This verb is shared in various Caribbean Arawakan languages such as Lokono (bokaüya 'to scare, frighten') and Parauhano (apüüta 'to scare'). In this case makabuka would mean "it does not frighten [me]".

Masculine gender was indicated by the noun suffix -(e)l. There is no known corresponding feminine suffix.

Vocabulary

Taíno borrowed words from Spanish, adapting them to its phonology. These include isúbara ("sword", from espada), isíbuse ("mirror", from espejo) and Dios (God in Christianity, from Dios).

English words derived from Taíno include: barbecue, caiman, canoe, cassava, cay, guava, hammock, hurricane, hutia, iguana, macana, maize, manatee, mangrove, maroon, potato, savanna, and tobacco.

Taíno loanwords in Spanish include: agutí, ají, auyama, batata, cacique, caoba, guanabana, guaraguao, jaiba, loro, maní, maguey (also rendered magüey), múcaro, nigua, querequequé, tiburón, and tuna, as well as the previous English words in their Spanish form: barbacoa, caimán, canoa, casabe, cayo, guayaba, hamaca, huracán, iguana, jutía, macana, maíz, manatí, manglar, cimarrón, patata, sabana, and tabaco.

Place names

Place names of Taíno origin include:

• Bahamas: ba-ha-ma 'large-upper-middle'
• Bimini: bimini 'twins'
• Boriquén (Puerto Rico, also rendered Borikén, Borinquen): borĩkẽ, borĩ ("native") -kẽ ("land") 'native land'
• Caicos: ka-i-ko 'nearby northern outlier'
• Cayman Islands: kaimã 'crocodile' or 'alligator'
• Cuba: cu-bao 'great fertile land'
• Haiti: ha-yi-ti 'land of mountains'
• Inagua: i-na-wa 'small eastern land'
• Jamaica: Ya-mah-ye-ka 'great spirit of the land of man'
• Quisqueya (Hispaniola): kis-ke-ya 'mother of all lands' in Taíno language, 'great thing' or 'native land'

Sample sentences

Six sentences of spoken Taíno were preserved. They are presented first in the original orthography in which they were recorded, then in a regularized orthography based on the reconstructed language and lastly in their English translation:

Original orthography	Reconstructed Taíno	English
O cama, guaxeri, guariquen caona yari.	O kãma, waxeri, warikẽ kawõna yari.	O, hear, sir, we see gold jewels.
Mayani macaná, Juan desquivel daca.	Mayani makana, Juan desquivel daka.	Do not kill [me], I am Juan de Esquivel.
Dios naboría daca.	Dios naboriya daka.	I am God's worker.
Ahiacauo, guarocoel.	Ahiyakawo, warokoel.	Speak [to] us, our grandfather.
Guaibbá, Cynato machabuca guamechina.	Waibá, sinato makabuka wamekina.	Let's go, it is not important [that] our master is upset.
Técheta cynato guamechina.	Teketa sinato wamekina.	Our master is greatly irritated.

Attempts at revival

Since the 2010s, there have been several publications that attempt at reconstructing modern Taíno lexicons by way of comparative linguistics with other related Arawak languages. Puertorican linguist Javier Hernandez published his Primario Basíco del Taíno-Borikenaíki in 2018 after a 16-year spanning research project with positive reception among the diaspora. In 2023, activist Jorge Baracutay Estevez and the Higuayagua Taino cultural organization he chairs (as "kasike") with help of linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald released Hiwatahia: Hekexi Taino Language Reconstruction, a formatted 20,000 word dictionary basing on languages of the wider Ta-Maipurean branch.

Bibliography

• Payne, D. L. (1991). "A classification of Maipuran (Arawakan) languages based on shared lexical retentions". In Derbyshire, D. C.; Pullum, G. K. (eds.). Handbook of Amazonian Languages. Vol. 3. Berlin.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Derbyshire, D. C. (1992). "Arawakan languages". In Bright, William (ed.). International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Vol. 1. New York.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)