a group of South American Indian languages that were spoken before the Spanish conquest from what is now the Greater Antilles to the central Mato Grosso in Brazil; most of the languages, however, were spoken north of the Amazon River in what is now northern Brazil, the inland areas of the Guianas and Venezuela, and lowland Colombia. West Indian Cariban is extinct, and the languages of the group have undergone a drastic decline in the other areas.