Saint Vincent. The Caribs had conquered the previous population of the islands, Arawakan peoples like the Taino and Palikur peoples. During the conquest, which was conducted primarily by men, the Carib took Arawakan women for wives. 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. Descriptions of Island Carib people in the 17th century missionaries from Europe record the use of two languages: Carib as spoken by the men, and Arawak as spoken by the women. It is conjectured that the males retained the core Carib vocabulary while the grammatical structure of their language mirrored that or Arawak. As such, Island Carib as spoken by males is considered either a mixed language or a relexified language. Vocabulary The vocabulary of Garifuna is composed as follows: 45% Arawak (Igneri) 25% Carib (Kallínagu) 15% French 10% English 5% Spanish or English technical terms Also, there also some few words from African languages. Comparison to Carib Gender differences Relatively few examples of diglossia remain in common speech. It is possible for men and women to use different words for the same concept such as for the pronoun "I", but most such words are rare and often dropped by men. For example, there are distinct Carib and Arawak words for "man" and "women", four words altogether, but in practice, the generic term "person" is used by both men and women and for both men and women, with grammatical gender agreement on a verb, adjective, or demonstrative, distinguishing whether refers to a man or to a woman ( "the man", "the woman"). There remains, however, a diglossic distinction in the grammatical gender of many inanimate nouns, with abstract words generally being considered grammatically feminine by men and grammatically masculine by women. Thus, the word may mean either concrete "sun" or abstract "day"; with the meaning of "day", most men use feminine agreement, at least in conservative speech, while women use masculine agreement. The equivalent of the abstract impersonal pronoun in phrases like "it is necessary" is also masculine for women but feminine in conservative male speech. Grammar Personal pronouns Independent personal pronouns in Garifuna distinguish the social gender of the speaker: The forms au and amürü are of Cariban origin, and the others are of Arawakan origin. Number Garifuna distinguishes singular and plural numbers. The marking of