The language was once confined to the Antillean islands of St. Vincent and Dominica, but its speakers, the Garifuna people, were deported by the British in 1797 to the north coast of Honduras[2] from where the language and Garifuna people has since spread along the coast south to Nicaragua and north to Guatemala and Belize.

The more Western and Central African-looking people were deported by the British from Saint Vincent to islands in the Bay of Honduras in 1796.

Children were raised by their mothers speaking Arawak, but as boys came of age, their fathers taught them Carib, a language still spoken in mainland South America.

It is conjectured that the males retained the core Carib vocabulary while the grammatical structure of their language mirrored that or Arawak.

The West African influence in Garifuna is limited to a handful of loanwords and perhaps intonation.

The vocabulary of Garifuna is composed as follows:[citation needed] Also, there also some few words from African languages.

For example, there are distinct Carib and Arawak words for "man" and "women", four words altogether, but often the generic terms mútu or gürígiya "person" are used by both men and women and for both men and women, with grammatical gender agreement on a verb, adjective, or demonstrative, distinguishing whether these words refer to a man or to a woman (mútu lé "the man", mútu tó "the woman").

The equivalent of the abstract impersonal pronoun in phrases like "it is necessary" is also masculine for women but feminine in conservative male speech.