writers continued to refer to the Indigenous group as Arawaks, Island Arawaks, or Antillean Arawaks until the 1990s. According to Brinton, the lingua franca spoken in Hispaniola had been the subject of "strange and wild theorizing among would-be philologists" and that it was Rafinesque who "christened it the "Taino" language".

Contemporary scholars such as Irving Rouse and Basil Reid have concluded the Taíno developed a distinct language and culture from the Lokono of South America. As such, many