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Miskito Dictionary

Research for the Lonely Planet Nicaragua – El Salvador guide required me to investigate enormous and little-explored eastern expanse of Nicaragua, sometimes referred to as the Mosquitia. The Mosquitia, which also includes the Honduran Atlantic Coast, has a very different history and culture than Central America’s much more thoroughly Hispanicized Pacific Coast.

The Pacific side is dryer, and was therefore easier for European colonists to settle and survive than the swampy, malaria-ridden jungles of the indigenous-controlled east. With the help of pirates, the indigenous nation that is today known as the Miskitos, managed to resist the Spanish incursion and retain control of the Mosquitia well into the 19th century. Indeed, since 1987 the Nicaraguan Mosquitia has been legally managed as two largely independent provinces, the RAAN (North Atlantic Autonomous Region) and RAAS (South Atlantic Autonomous Region).

Although Spanish is the Nicaragua’s official language, Caribbean English is still spoken in throughout the region (and remains the primary language of the Corn Islands), while several indigenous languages, including Mayangna (Sumo), Rama and various Creoles, also survive. But Miskito remains the most widely spoken indigenous tongue in Nicaragua, and many people, particularly those in rural areas, speak it exclusively. I wanted to learn enough Miskito to navigate these small villages while on the job.

Happily, one of my coworkers at Hotel Liberia in Costa Rica, Miskito Indian Jonny Nixon, could not only fix just about anything, but was also willing to teach me a little Miskito during his downtime. We had so much fun that my goal of building a small phrasebook quickly grew out of control. This little lexicon, which features the dialect of the tongue spoken in the Bluefields area, is the result of those lessons.

Please keep in mind that I am not a professional linguist; you may notice that even my Spanish isn’t perfect. If you do speak Spanish, there’s another free Miskito dictionary available online, compiled by Dr. Danilo Salamanca. And f you’re feeling really ambitious, you could take classes from Professor Dionisio Melgara Brown (brownmelgara@hotmail.com, in Spanish only), who runs the Museo Auka Tangki in Waspám, Nicaragua, close to the Honduran border. He also sells his comprehensive, self-published Diccionario Práctico Español-Miskito (US$18) and a workbook of grammar exercises, Aprendamos El Miskito (US$7.50) at the museum.

Miskito Dictionary

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Kuna Dictionary

Duleigaiya, the Kuna language, is not traditionally written, but is spoken by between 30,000 and 70,000 people as their primary language. Like other native regional languages, much meaning relies on groups of suffixes, and some prefixes, tacked on to the word. While Spanish grammar uses the sex of objects and to determine the structure of their modifiers, Kuna grammar changes according to direction, location, and/or the time and duration of the subject. Position is evidently more important grammatically than verb tenses.

You may view or download the dictionary as a .pdf file.

Kuna Dictionary

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