Garifuna (Karif) is a minority language still widely spoken in villages of Garifuna people in the western part of the north coast of Central America. It is a member of the Arawakan languages family albeit an atypical one since, 1) it is spoken outside of the Arawakan language area which is otherwise confined to the northern parts of South America, and 2) because it contains an unusually high number of loanwords, from both Carib languages and a number of European languages, attesting to an extremely tumultuous past involving warfare, migration and colonization. The language was once confined to the Antillean islands of St. Vincent and Dominica, but its speakers, the Garifuna people, were deported en masse by the British in 1797 to the north coast of Honduras from where the language and Garifuna people have since spread along the coast south to Nicaragua and north to Guatemala and Belize. It is still widely spoken in many Garifuna villages throughout this coastal region. In recent years a large number of Garifunas have settled in larger US cities, presumably as part of a more general pattern of north bound migration.