Hammock
hamaca
The woven sleeping net, carried into every language of the sea.
03 / Language
You already speak it
Arawak words are in your mouth every week.
The family
One of the great language families of the Americas
Arawakan is not a single language but a family — dozens of related languages spread across South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Lokono (Arawak) is still spoken on the mainland coasts of Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela and French Guiana. Garifuna, carried to Central America, is Arawakan too. Taíno, the speech of the Greater Antilles, was silenced as a daily language but never fully erased.
Loanwords
Words the world kept
English took these from Arawakan languages through Spanish. They survived the people who were supposed to disappear.
Canoe
canoa
The dugout vessel that connected the islands and the mainland.
Hurricane
hurakán
The storm named before Europe had a word for it.
Barbecue
barbacoa
The raised wooden frame for slow-cooking over fire.
Tobacco
tabaco
Ceremonial before it was ever commercial.
Savanna
zabana
Open grassland — the shape of the land itself.
Iguana
iwana
Named by the people who lived alongside it.
Cay
cayo
The small low island; still on every chart in the Caribbean.
Revival
Speaking it back
Lokono is endangered: most fluent speakers are elders, and the work of teaching it to children is being done village by village, family by family. Taíno revitalization efforts reconstruct vocabulary from colonial records, place names and related Arawakan languages — contested work, done by descendants who refuse the past tense.
Language is the last thing colonization takes and the first thing a people rebuild. This site treats it that way.