#native american languages

Language Moodboard: Wayuu 

The Wayuu language is spoken by the Wayuu; a Native American people indigenous to the region of La Guajira on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and Colombia. The Wayuu refer to their language as Wayuunaiki, and according to linguists it belongs to the Ta-Arawakan branch of the Arawakan linguistic family. Due to this fact, it is believed to be closely related to the now extinct Taíno language; the first language encountered in the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards when they reached the Bahamas.

The Wayuu are one of the fastest growing Indigenous groups in South America, because of this the language which has around 300,000 speakers is also growing, however social pressure to learn the Spanish language has become an obstacle for maintaining that growth. The main cause of this social pressure is one that is seen throughout Latin America, which is the prevalent discrimination of speakers of non-European languages, specifically Indigenous ones, by those who speak European based colonial languages such as Spanish, French, or Portuguese. Wayuu activists have launched many initiatives, such as creating the first illustrated Wayuu-Spanish dictionary, in hopes to promote interchange between speakers of the Indigenous language and those of Spanish, but also to instill pride in young Wayuu’s who feel they need to adopt Spanish as their primary language in order to mobilize socially.

The Wayuu as an Indigenous group are unique as they managed to resist Spanish colonization unlike most other native Colombian and Venezuelan groups, and for this reason there has been minimal Spanish influence on the language until very recently. This factor has also helped in making them the largest Indigenous ethnic group in Colombia and Venezuela simultaneously, and thus the Wayuu language the most commonly spoken Indigenous language in the both countries.