Taíno language

Scholarly debate exists about which Indigenous languages of the Caribbean should be classified as Taino. The linguist Douglas Taylor has written that there were 55 languages and dialects of "Insular Northern Arawakan", which he subdivided into Lesser Antilles and Greater Antilles. Taylor classified Igneri and Cabre as Lesser Antilles, while classifying Taino, Sub-Taino, Ciguayo, and Lucayan as Greater Antilles. Douglas wrote that there were two types of Taino (Taino of Hispaniola and Taino of Puerto Rico) and two types of Sub-Taino (Sub-Taino of Cuba and Sub-Taino of Jamaica).^[4]

Julian Granberry and Gary 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.

The archaeologist L. Antonio Curet has questioned whether the Ciboney people and language should be referred to as "Taíno", writing that "Despite its widespread use in academic and popular publications, the use of the term Taíno has not gone without criticism or opposition" and that academics since the 1800s have been "criticizing its use and questioning its scientific basis and value and suggested using instead names such as siboneyes, haytianos, jamaiquinos, and borinqueños that were more related to actual terms used by the natives to refer to the islands."^[5]

The anthropologist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque wrote that "...from Bahama to Cuba, Boriquen to Jamaica, the same language was spoken in various slight dialects, but understood by all." According to Rafinesque, "Columbus himself says so."^[6]

Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that the Xaraguá language was the main dialect of the primary language spoken in Hispaniola at the time the Spaniards arrived. Xaraguá was also spoken in parts of Cuba.^[7] However, elsewhere Las Casas notes that the neighboring languages were not intelligible with each other.

Tres lenguas habia en esta Isla distintas, que la una á la otra no se entendía; la una era de la gente que llamábamos del Macoríx de abajo, y la otra de los vecinos del Macoríx de arriba, que pusimos arriba por cuarta y por sexta provincias; la otra lengua fué la universal de toda la tierra.^[8]
("Three languages on this island [of Hispaniola] were distinct, in that they could not understand one another; the first was that of the people [of the region] we called the Lower Macorix, and the other that of their neighbors of the Upper Macorix [the Ciguayos], which we described above as the 4th and 6th provinces; the other language was the universal one of all the land".)

The Taíno language was not written. The Taínos used petroglyphs,^{[9][better source needed]} but there has been little research in the area. The following phonemes are reconstructed from Spanish records:^[10]

The flap [ɾ] 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.^{[citation needed]}

Some Spanish writers used the letter ⟨x⟩ in their transcriptions, which could represent /h/, /s/ or /ʃ/ in the Spanish orthography of their day.^[11] Certain potential cognates suggest a value of /ʃ/, however. for example, the Kalinago word transcribed by French missionaries as chaouái has been connected to the Taíno word xagüeye "cave".^[12]

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.

Classic Taíno is not well attested.^[2] 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'.^[10]

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]".^{[citation needed]}

Modern-day Taíno language variants follow slightly different grammar and word order from each other.

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.^[6]: 229

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,^[13] as well as the previous English words in their Spanish form: barbacoa, caimán, canoa, casabe,^[14] cayo, guayaba, hamaca, huracán, iguana, jutía, macana,^[15] maíz, manatí, manglar, cimarrón, patata, sabana, and tabaco.

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:^[10]

Since the 2010s, there have been several publications that attempt to reconstruct modern Taíno lexicons by way of comparative linguistics with other related Arawakan languages. Puerto Rican 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.^[17] In 2023, Jorge Baracutay Estevez, the Higuayagua Taino cultural organization and linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald published Hiwatahia: Hekexi Taino Language Reconstruction, a formatted 20,000 word dictionary basing on languages of the wider Ta-Maipurean branch.^[18]

There are several modern-day reconstructed Taíno language variants including: Hiwatahia-Taino and Tainonaiki. Taíno revivalist organizations such as the Higuayagua Taíno of the Caribbean are carrying out language revitalization efforts. The Higuayagua published the Hiwatahia-Taino Language Dictionary and provided classes for its community.^[18][19]