Martinique Martinique Martinique () is an insular region of France located in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies in the eastern Caribbean Sea, with a land area of and a population of 385,551 inhabitants as of January 2013. Like Guadeloupe, it is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department. One of the Windward Islands, it is directly north of Saint Lucia, southeast of Greater Antilles, northwest of Barbados, and south of Dominica. As with the other overseas departments, Martinique is one of the eighteen regions of France (being an overseas region) and an integral part of
Languages of the Caribbean can also be observed on Dominica, Saint Vincent, Carriacou, Petite Martinique and Grenada. Asian languages such as Chinese and other Indian languages such as Tamil are spoken by Asian expatriates and their descendents exclusively. In earlier historical times, other Indo-European languages, such as German, could be found in northeastern parts of the Caribbean. Throughout the long multilingual history of the Caribbean continent, Caribbean languages have been subject to phenomena like language contact, language expansion, language shift, and language death. Two examples are the Spanish expansion, in which Spanish-speaking peoples expanded over most of central Caribbean, thereby displacing Arawak speaking peoples