Our language heritage

According to ‘Ethnologue, Languages of the World’, the number of individual languages listed for Guyana is 17. Of these, 14 are living and 3 are extinct. Of the living languages, 2 are institutional, 7 are in trouble, and 5 are dying.
Guyana’s national language is English, the language used in education, work, mass media, and government at the national level – an inheritance of our British colonial history; while Guyanese Creole English, according to ‘Ethologue’, is the “De facto language of national identity”, spoken by 650,000 individuals of an estimated population of 700,000 at the time of the ‘Ethologue’ publication.

Guyanese Creole English is classified in ‘Ethnologue’ as Educational since the language is in vigorous use, with standardization and literature being sustained through a widespread system of institutionally supported education.
Akawaio, spoken by about 4,500 (2002 SIL) indigenous people of the Mazaruni river basin, north of Patamona, is listed as threatened. Carib, spoken by about 6 per cent of Guyana’s indigenous peoples, is also a threatened language today. The language is said to be spoken by the Caribs of Northwest, coastal river heads and coastal lowland forests, of which there are about 480 speakers in Guyana (1991).
Other threatened languages are Patamona, spoken by some indigenous people in about 13 villages of the West central, upland savannah in Pakaraima Mountains. In upland savannah, Upper Mazaruni Region, Paruima, the Pemon language is also listed as threatened, with less than 500 speakers recorded in 1990. Southwest of Guyana, and south of the Kanuku mountains, Wapishana, spoke by indigenous peoples of the same name, is also a threatened language.
‘Ethnologue’ defines threatened languages as languages used for face-to-face communication within all generations, but losing users.

Moribund
Moribund languages have only members of the grandparent generation, and older, remaining active users of the language.
Arawak people comprise about 33 per cent of indigenous populations in Guyana that inhabit the West coast and northeast of the country, along the Corentyne River. In 1990, researcher Janet Forte documented about 1,500 individuals who spoke the Arawak language in Guyana, which has become listed as moribund.
Other moribund languages are Atorada, or Atorai, spoken by few indigenous people inhabiting southwest of the country; Waiwai, comprising a group of about 200 (Forte 1990) speakers in Guyana living in the southwest, headwaters of Essequibo river, and Warao (Warau, Warrau) from the northwest of the country and Oreala, near the coast, which has few speakers.

Near Extinct and Shifting
In the southwest Guyana, Mawayana, spoken by about 50 indigenous individuals, is described as near extinct since, according to ‘Ethnologue’, the only remaining users of the language are members of the grandparent generation or older who have little opportunity to use the language.
A language is considered shifting when the child-bearing generation can use the language among themselves, but it is not being transmitted to children.
In Guyana, Caribbean Hindustani and Macushi are the two languages considered by ethnologists as shifting. While the former is said to have an ethnic population of about 539,000 in Guyana, the latter has only 930 individuals using the language out of an ethnic population of 7,750 (Crevels 2007).

Extinct
Berbice Creole Dutch, once spoken in the Berbice river area, has no remaining speakers and is now considered extinct since the language is no longer used and no one retains a sense of ethnic identity associated with the language. The language is described as having had about one-third of the basic lexicon and most of the productive morphology from Izon in Nigeria, with most of the rest of the lexicon from Dutch, with 10 per cent loans from Arawak and Guyanese Creole English.
Mapidian, spoken by indigenous individuals of southwest Guyana, also known as Maiopitian or Maopityan, is also declared extinct in Guyana, as its speakers are said to have migrated to Brazil in the 1960s.
The Skepi Dutch Creole language among some in the Essequibo Region has also been termed extinct.
‘Ethnologue: Languages of the World’ is compiled and published by SIL International (www.sil.org), a non-profit organization committed to serving ethnolinguistic minority communities worldwide and building capacity for sustainable language-based development by means of research, translation, training and materials development. It can be found at http://www.ethnologue.com