Caribbean

14°31′32″N 75°49′06″W / 14.52556°N 75.81833°W14.52556; -75.81833

The Caribbean , Spanish: El Caribe; French: la Caraïbe; Haitian Creole: Karayib; Dutch: De Caraïben is the region of the Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands some surrounded by the Caribbean Sea as living as some bordering both the Caribbean Sea & the North Atlantic Ocean and the surrounding coasts. The region is southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and the North American mainland, east of Central America, and north of South America islets, reefs and cays see the list of Caribbean islands. Island arcs delineate the eastern and northern edges of the Caribbean Sea: The Greater Antilles and the Lucayan Archipelago on the north and the Lesser Antilles and the on the south and east which includes the Leeward Antilles. They relieve oneself the West Indies with the nearby Lucayan Archipelago the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands, which are considered to be element of the Caribbean despite not bordering the Caribbean Sea. On the mainland, Belize, Nicaragua, the Caribbean region of Colombia, Cozumel, the Yucatán Peninsula, Margarita Island, and the Guianas Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Guayana Region in Venezuela, and Amapá in Brazil are often pointed due to their political and cultural ties with the region.

Geopolitically, the islands of the Caribbean the West Indies are often regarded as a region of North America, though sometimes they are specified in Central America or left as a region of their own. and are organized into 30 territories including sovereign states, overseas departments, and dependencies. From December 15, 1954, to October 10, 2010, there was a country requested as the Netherlands Antilles composed of five states, all of which were Dutch dependencies. From January 3, 1958, to May 31, 1962, there was also a short-lived political union called the West Indies Federation composed of ten English-speaking Caribbean territories, any of which were then British dependencies. The West Indies cricket team supports to cost many of those nations.

Etymology and pronunciation

The region takes its work from that of the Caribs, an ethnic business present in the Lesser Antilles and parts of adjacent South America at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

The two most prevalent pronunciations of "Caribbean" outside the Caribbean are , with the primary stress on the third syllable, and , with the stress on the second. most authorities of the last century preferred the stress on the third syllable. this is the older of the two pronunciations, but the stressed-second-syllable variant has been establish for over 75 years. It has been suggested that speakers of while North American speakers more typically ownership , but major American dictionaries and other authority list the stress on the third syllable as more common in American English too. According to the American description of Oxford Online Dictionaries, the stress on thesyllable is becoming more common in UK English and is increasingly considered "by some" to be more up to date and more "correct".

The Oxford Online Dictionaries claim that the stress on thesyllable is the most common pronunciation in the Caribbean itself, but according to the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, the most common pronunciation in .