Galibi is a Cariban language spoken in Venezuela, Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname. They number over 14,000 with the majority of speakers living in Venezuela. There are over 10,000 speakers of Galibi. The language seems very healthy since young children are being raised monolingual in the language. The Galibi people also inhabited the islands of Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago pre-European invasion and the Galibi language was the dominant language of Trinidadian Amerindians. The Galibi people served as a major link in trading between the Kalinago people and the various Cariban-speaking groups on the South American mainland.

Galibi is known by many names such as Karina, Kalina, Karinya, Kalinya, and Caribe. The last name is one of the reasons Galibi is known as "true Carib" because the word Caribe (and eventually Carib) is a corruption of the word Galibi. The European invaders to the Caribbean could not distinguish between the Kalinago people and other ethnic groups of the Caribbean and called all of them "Caribs".

Notes: These words use SIL's (Summer Institute of Linguistics) orthography for the Galibi language.

• The letter "y" is not like "year" but instead is a vowel not found in English. To pronounce this vowel say the "oo" in "pool" then unround your lips while saying it.
• The letter "j" is pronounced like the "y" in "year".
• The apostrophe represents a glottal stop. In English we make this sound when we say the word "uh-oh". It's that little catch in your throat between the "uh" and the "oh".

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LINKS

• Galibi do Oiapoque: A great page about the Galibi of Brazil.


• Online Carib (Galibi) - English dictionary