People in Honduras
The vast majority of Hondurans are descendants of
relationships between European immigrants (especially
Spaniards) and members of the indigenous peoples. 90
percent of the population belong to it. 7 percent are
indigenous, 2 percent African and 1 percent European.
The west of the country is much more densely populated
than the east. Most of the largest cities in the country
are also found here.
Indigenous people in Honduras
The largest group of indigenous people, the Lenca,
live on the border with El Salvador in the southwest of
the country. Around 100,000 Lenca live in Honduras.
Around 4,000 members of the Chortí, descendants of the
Maya from Copán, still live in the northwest.
Other indigenous peoples live in the center of the
country and in the northeast of the country, the
Mosquitia. They belong to several peoples: the Miskito,
the Mayangna (or: Sumo) and the Paya (in their own
language they call themselves Pech, the word means
"people"). Miskito and Mayangna also live cross-border
in Nicaragua, especially along rivers such as the Río
Coco (border river to Nicaragua) or the Río Patuca.
There are about 25,000 miskito in Honduras (and 100,000
in Nicaragua). About 10,000 Mayangna live in both
countries. Only about 3800 people are members of the
Paya.
Who are the Garifuna?
Descendants of Africans and Caribs are the Garifuna.
They come from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. Two
slave ships stranded there in 1635. In 1795 the British
took possession of the island and resettled the Garifuna
on islands off Honduras, from where they also spread to
Belize and Guatemala. In Honduras, the Garifuna live
mainly in the coastal cities of the Caribbean Sea and on
the islands of the Islas de la Bahía and Cayos Cochinos.
- Children: Every woman in Honduras has an
average of 2 children. With us, every woman has an
average of 1.4 children. So the families in Honduras
are bigger than ours. A third of the population is
under 14 years old - for us that is only 13 percent.
The average age of the population is 24 years - in
Germany it is 47 years!
- Urban and rural: More than half of
Honduran residents live in cities (58 percent). But
more and more people are drawn there in the hope of
finding work. This is called rural exodus. So the
slums grow in cities like Tegucigalpa.
Languages in Honduras
Spanish is the official language in Honduras. School
lessons are therefore also held in Spanish.
The indigenous peoples have their own language.
Miskito and sumo are languages spoken by the peoples
of the same name. Sumo is threatened with extinction
because there are hardly any speakers left. Miskito
belongs to the Misumalpan language family and is easy to
learn: all words are stressed on the first syllable,
there is no plural, nouns have no gender (no "der, die,
das"), there are only three vowels (a, i and u) and the
vocabulary is small. Sounds good right? Maybe we should
all learn Miskito as a foreign language...
The pitch or paya language is one of the chibcha
languages. In 1993 there were only just under 1000
speakers. So this language is also threatened. There are
10 vowels and 16 consonants and two pitches in which to
speak.
The Garifuna on the Caribbean coast speak their own
language, which is either called Garifuna or Igñeri.
Often they also speak Creole, which is a
Caribbean-colored English.
Religions in Honduras
97 percent of the population are Catholics, 3 percent
are Protestants.
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