Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken along the Caribbean coast of Central America, chiefly in Honduras, Belize and Guatemala, with smaller communities in Nicaragua. It developed on the island of St Vincent from Arawak and Carib roots, later absorbing loanwords from French, Spanish and English, and reached the Central American mainland after the British deported the Garifuna people to Roatan in 1797. Estimates of speaker numbers vary, but around 100,000 people are thought to use the language today, written in the Latin alphabet. One unusual feature is that some vocabulary differs depending on whether the speaker is a man or a woman, a trace of its mixed Arawak and Carib ancestry. In 2001 UNESCO proclaimed the Garifuna language, dance and music a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
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