The Taino were the original indigenous people of the island that is now Puerto Rico. While it was long believed that the Taino were extinct, recent advances in the study of ancient DNA found that modern residents of Puerto Rico still often carry Taino genetic material. The Taino language is no longer spoken and so is classified as a dead language, but it lives on in a number of words used in modern English and Spanish.
The Taino language
The Taíno language was part of the Arawakan language family, which includes some living languages spoken in Guatemala, Venezuela, Belize, and other Latin American nations. Long before European contact, Arawakan languages were spoken across much of northern South America and the Caribbean, and Taíno emerged as the dominant language of the Greater Antilles, including present-day Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and parts of the Bahamas. While regional varieties existed, speakers across these islands were generally mutually intelligible, facilitating trade, political alliances, and shared religious practices.
Taíno was an oral language, though some observers believe that a writing system might have been emerging at the time of contact with Europeans. Knowledge, history, and social norms were transmitted through storytelling, ritual speech, songs (areítos), and communal ceremonies. There is no evidence of a native writing system, so what is known about Taíno comes from early Spaniards who recorded vocabulary and phrases using Spanish orthography in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These early records, though fragmentary and filtered through European perspectives, provide valuable insight into Taíno society, cosmology, agriculture, and daily life.
Following Spanish colonization, Taíno rapidly declined as a spoken language as the indigenous population diminished. By the mid-sixteenth century, it was no longer spoken as a community language, though it survived through loanwords and place names. Today, Taíno is considered an extinct language, but it remains culturally significant. Linguistic reconstruction efforts and cultural revival movements in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean continue to study Taíno vocabulary and expressions as an important link to indigenous Caribbean heritage.
Loan words
Loan words are words that one language picks up from another language. For example, Spanish took fútbol from the English word “football” and English took “canyon” from cañón. Modern English has quite a few loanwords from Taino:
- Hurricane – from hurakán, a powerful storm deity
- Barbecue – from barbacoa, a wooden framework used for cooking
- Canoe – from kanowa, a dugout boat
- Hammock – from hamaka, a hanging bed made of fibers
- Tobacco – from tabaco, referring to rolled leaves or smoking tubes
- Maize – from mahís, meaning corn
- Cassava – from kasabi, a starchy root staple
- Yucca (via Spanish yuca) – a tropical root vegetable (distinct from the ornamental “yucca” plant)
- Iguana – from iwana, the large Caribbean lizard
- Manatee – from manatí, the marine mammal
- Savanna – from zabana, an open grassy plain
- Caiman – from kaiman, a crocodilian
Strictly speaking, these words were loan words from Taino into Spanish which then became loan words from Spanish into English! In Puerto Rico today, you can expect to hear both the Spanish and English forms. Either way, they continue to show the important influence of the Taino culture in the modern world.
