The Arawak or Arowak), whose language is dealt with in this work, inhabit the coastal districts of Surinam and British Guiana; they formerly lived still further East, even as far as the mouth of the Orinoco and Trinidad.

Many vocabularies and a good deal of grammatical information have been published from Arawak, but very few sentences of the language usually spoken and no texts at all of myths etc.; this paucity, however, is compensated for to a large extent by excellent translations from parts of the bible by the Moravian missionaries, and the English missionary Mr. Brett. The grammatical system, strictly adhered to in these bible-texts cannot possibly have been derived from the existing grammars (List of Litterature 5c, 18, 23b), and must therefore be attributed to the cooperation of an Arawak who assisted in the translation or in the correction of it. We may then consider them as being genuine. Arawak (especially Brett's texts; those of Schultz contain a freeer translation, which is not so easy to follow).

In this work Brett's texts (11. 5a, b) have been used in the first place, and an endeavour has been made, to discuss all the particularities of the language as found in those texts.

In the second place Schultz's texts have been examined, and all that deviates from Brett, or is not found in Brett, has been discussed here.