Garifuna (Karif) is a minority language still widely spoken in villages of Garifuna people in the western part of the northern coast of Central America. It is a member of the Arawakan languages family but an atypical one since it is spoken outside of the Arawakan language area, which is otherwise confined to the northern parts of South America, and because it contains an unusually high number of loanwords, from both Carib languages and a number of European languages because of an extremely tumultuous past involving warfare, migration and colonization. The language was once confined to the Antillean islands of St. Vincent and Dominica, but its speakers, the Garifuna people, were deported en masse by the British in 1797 to the north coast of Honduras from where the language and Garifuna peop