Large family of South American Indian languages.
It has an estimated 43 members; nearly half are now extinct, and most of the remainder have very few speakers. Most Cariban languages are spoken in southern Venezuela, the Guianas, and Brazil north of the Amazon, though several have strayed far from this area. Cariban incursions into the mainly Arawakan-speaking Antilles at the time of Columbus provided European languages with the words Carib (hence, Caribbean) and cannibal, both perhaps from a proto-Cariban form meaning “Indian, person.”
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