This article is about the Island Carib, who lived on the islands of the Caribbean. For the Carib language-speaking peoples of the South American continent, see Carib languages.

Carib or Island Carib is the name of a people of the Lesser Antilles islands, after whom the Caribbean Sea was named. Originally from South America, they are believed to have left the Orinoco jungles of Venezuela to settle in the Caribbean. They are an Amerindian people from the southern West Indies and the northern coast of South America. About one hundred years before the arrival of Columbus the Caribs began to displace the Arawak in the Caribbean archipelago, but were later themselves displaced and all but exterminated.

Carib culture is said to have been extremely patriarchal, with Carib men treating their women as servants and the women cooking, cleaning, etc. Women lived in separate houses, and are said often to have spoken a different language -- Arawak, since Caribs often captured women in raids upon the Arawaks.

The Caribs were skilled boatbuilders and sailors, and seem to have owed their dominance in the Caribbean basin to their mastery of the arts of war (Rogozinski). Europeans arriving on the Caribbean Islands in the 16th century remarked on the Caribs' aggressive and warlike ways. Instances of cannibalism were noted — in fact, the English word cannibal comes from the Spanish caníbalis, recorded by Columbus from the Carib karibna, for 'person.' (Some think it important to note, however, that the Caribs only ate human flesh during religious war rituals. It is also noteworthy that in 1503 Queen Isabella ruled that only cannibals could be legally taken as slaves, which gave Europeans an incentive to identify various Native American groups as cannibals.)

Europeans claimed that the Caribs were aggressive and loved to fight as they pushed them back and all but exterminated them. The Caribs were able to retain only two islands — Dominica and Saint Vincent. Saint Vincent who had mixed with black slaves from a 1675 shipwreck were relocated in 1795 to Roatan Island, off Honduras, where their descendants, the Garífuna, still live today. The Caribs' resistance delayed the settlement of Dominica by Europeans, and a few thousand of them still remain there. The last known speakers of Island Carib, however, died in the 1920s.

Some common words in use in English were borrowed from the Carib language, such as "hammock," "iguana," "hurricane" (after the Carib god of evil), and "maize."

At the time of European incursion, the Caribs were aggressively advancing against the Arawakan-speaking Taíno, who lived on the islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. Archaeological evidence suggests that Arawakan peoples had inhabited the Caribbean islands since about 100 CE.