Taíno language

The Taíno was an ancient language spoken by the Taíno people who lived in the Caribbean islands. At the time the Spanish arrived, it was the most widely spoken language in the whole Caribbean region. It was used in many places including the Leeward Islands, the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico (called Boriquen), most of Hispaniola (Ayiti), and eastern Cuba.

Before the Taíno language became common, there were other languages spoken in the Greater Antilles, but by the late 1400s, Taíno had mostly replaced them. However, as the Spanish began to colonize these islands, the Taíno culture and language slowly disappeared, being replaced by Spanish, English, and French.

Even though the Taíno language is no longer spoken, many of its words live on in modern languages. Because it was the first Indigenous language Europeans met in the Americas, it gave many new words to European languages. Today, there are projects working to create a new version of the Taíno language called Neo-Taíno.

Name

The word "Taíno" was not used to describe a group of people or their language at first. People have argued about whether it is the right name and how it should be used. In the past, people used names like "Arawak language" or "Island Arawak language". But since the 1980s, many have started using "Taíno" to make it clear from the Lokono language spoken in South America.

Dialects

The 19th-century anthropologist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque wrote that the same language was spoken from Bahama to Cuba, from Boriquen to Jamaica, with only small differences in dialects, but everyone could understand each other. According to Rafinesque, even Columbus noted this in his letter about his first voyage.

Bartolomé de las Casas observed that while there were ethnic differences between groups like the Cuban Ciboney and the Cuban and Hispaniolan Taíno, they all spoke the same language.

Julian Granberry and Gary Vescelius (2004) identified two dialects of Taíno:

• Classic (Eastern) Taíno, or Taíno proper, was spoken in the Lesser Antilles north of Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, central Hispaniola, and the southernmost Turks & Caicos. It was also spreading into eastern and central Cuba around the time the Spanish arrived.
• Ciboney (Western) Taíno was spoken in central-western Cuba, the Lucayan Archipelago (the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos), and likely in rural parts of western Hispaniola and Jamaica.

Classic Taíno served as the common language of the region. The five main areas led by leaders on Hispaniola each had their own slight dialect of Classic Taíno, in addition to two other languages not related to Taíno. The dialect from Xaraguá was considered the most respected and had spread to westernmost Cuba just before Europeans arrived.

Phonology

The Taíno language was not written, so we know about it only from Spanish records. Researchers have studied these records to understand the sounds of the language.

Some sounds changed depending on where they appeared in a word. For example, a certain sound was heard at the start of a word but changed when it appeared between vowels. Spanish writers sometimes used the letter ⟨x⟩, which could stand for different sounds in their writing system.

The language also had special vowel sounds, including some nasal vowels that were not used very often. Certain sounds could only appear at the end of words or syllables, and the emphasis or "stress" in words followed specific patterns.

Grammar

The Taíno language is not very well known, but what we do know shows some interesting patterns. Nouns in Taíno had special endings to show their group, much like other languages in the Arawakan family. We have some words that show ownership, like da- meaning "my", wa- meaning "our", and li- meaning "his".

We also have some recorded verbs, such as daka meaning "I am", waibá meaning "we go" or "let us go", and warikẽ meaning "we see". These verbs change with special prefixes, similar to how nouns show ownership. For example, the prefix ma- means "not", so makabuka translates to "it is not important".

Today, people who try to speak Neo-Taíno use slightly different grammar and word order in their versions of the language.

Vocabulary

The Taíno language borrowed words from Spanish, changing them to fit its sounds. Some examples are isúbara meaning "sword" from the Spanish word espada, isíbuse meaning "mirror" from espejo, and Dios meaning God in Christianity from the Spanish Dios.

Many English words come from the Taíno language. These include barbecue, caiman, canoe, cassava, cay, guava, hammock, hurricane, hutia, iguana, macana, maize, manatee, mangrove, maroon, potato, savanna, and tobacco.^: 229 

The Taíno language also influenced Spanish words. Some of these are agutí, ají, auyama, batata, cacique, caoba, guanabana, guaraguao, jaiba, loro, maní, maguey, múcaro, nigua, querequequé, tiburón, and tuna. English words like barbacoa, caimán, and others also came from Taíno words.

Place names

Researchers found that 39 island names in the Lucayan archipelago came from the Taíno language. Some examples are:

• Grand Bahama: ba-ha-ma meaning 'large-upper-middle'
• Bimini: bimini meaning 'twins'
• Inagua: i-na-wa meaning 'small eastern land'
• North Caicos: ka-i-ko meaning 'near-northern-outlier'
• Borinquen (the old name for Puerto Rico): boriquen, bori (native) -ke (land) meaning 'native land'

Sample sentences

Six sentences of the Taíno language have been saved. They are shown in the way they were first written, then in a more standard way based on what scholars think the language looked like, and finally in English translation.

Revival projects

Since the 2010s, people have worked to create a new version of the Taíno language by studying other well-known languages from the same family. In 2018, a Puerto Rican expert shared a book of basic Taíno words after many years of research. In 2023, another expert and a cultural group published a big dictionary with thousands of Taíno words.

Because there aren't many old records of the Taíno language, these new projects might not sound exactly like the old language. Some people try to make it sound like their ancestors did, while others focus on creating a way to connect with their heritage, even if it isn't perfect. Some words used in these projects might actually come from other languages, not Taíno.