Kalinago
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Kalinago
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  • Please provide some background information about this language. Where is it spoken? What communities speak this language? Is this language endangered?
  • What are the names of the people who built this dictionary? Whose voices are in this dictionary?
  • Where did the data in this dictionary come from? Please describe if you collected the data yourself. If you used any published reference sources, please list them.
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Kalinago is an Arawakan language that is indigenous to the island of St. Vincent as well as the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean region. The language is known in the literature by many names such as Island Carib, Igneri and others. 

The Kalinago Living Dictionary was started in 2021 by two Kalinago descendants: Denise Defreitas (Canada) and her sister Heddie Osment (UK), in collaboration with Anna Luisa Daigneault at Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in the US. This digital project is currently under construction; the first batch of lexical data was imported in August 2021. The data in the dictionary was compiled by Denise Defreitas over several years based on historical documents and essays written about the Kalinago. The next phase of research will be to dig into documents written by French colonial historians who were allies of the Kalinago.

 

Further Reading: 
See Kalinago resources listed on Glottolog

Kalinago Archive - a website maintained by the Kalinago Council

Kalinago Language Page - by the Government of the Commonwealth of Dominica: Division of Culture