Word.ws English Dictionary

Cariban

Cariban adjective: of or relating to languages of the Cariban family, a family of Amerindian languages spoken in northeastern South America, characterized by small phonemic inventories, split ergativity, broadly left-branching word order (SOV and OVS, with postpositions), portmanteau agreement, and marking of possession on the possessed noun.

Adjective

Cariban (not comparable)

  1. Of or relating to languages of the Cariban family, a family of Amerindian languages spoken in northeastern South America, characterized by small phonemic inventories, split ergativity, broadly left-branching word order (SOV and OVS, with postpositions), portmanteau agreement, and marking of possession on the possessed noun.
  2. Of or relating to the peoples who speak these languages.
  3. Of or relating to the Carib people (in all senses, whether linguistically Cariban or Arawakan).

Origin of Cariban

From Carib + -an.

Questions about Cariban

What does Cariban mean?
Cariban means of or relating to languages of the Cariban family, a family of Amerindian languages spoken in northeastern South America, characterized by small phonemic inventories, split ergativity, broadly left-branching word order (SOV and OVS, with postpositions), portmanteau agreement, and marking of possession on the possessed noun.
What part of speech is Cariban?
Cariban is an adjective.

Words near Cariban in the dictionary

  1. carib
  2. Carib physa
  3. Carib physae
  4. Carib physas
  5. Carib.
  6. Cariban
  7. Caribbean
  8. Caribbean box jellyfish
  9. Caribbean box jellyfishes
  10. Caribbean Community
  11. Caribbean coot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Cariban (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Cariban.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cariban. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.