Taíno language

Taíno is an extinct Arawakan language of the Ta-Arawakan branch that was spoken throughout the Caribbean by the Taíno, Ciboney, Lucayan and Yamaye peoples across the Greater and Lesser Antilles, including Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas. At the time of Spanish contact it was the most widely spoken language in the Caribbean, but it had no writing system of its own and is known today only through Spanish transcriptions made by early colonists. The language went extinct by the seventeenth century as Spanish colonization displaced its speakers, though it left numerous loanwords in Spanish and English, including hurricane, canoe, hammock, tobacco and potato. Since the 2010s, revival projects have attempted to reconstruct a Neo-Taíno language using comparative evidence from related Arawakan languages.