ABSTRACT
The Miskitu are an Amerindian people whose current population totals about 170,000, including 120,000 within the borders of Nicaragua (calculated from Hale and Gordon 1987:18), fifty thousand in Honduras (calculated from Ashby 1976:6 and Velásquez and Agerkop 1979:11), and a small number of families in Managua, Nicaragua, and along the coast in northeastern Costa Rica. With the neighboring Sumu [see Nicaragua], the Miskitu speak a language belonging to the Macro-Chibcha linguistic phylum. Chibchan-speakers once occupied the greater part of the Caribbean coastal region known as the Atlantic Coast (Holm 1978:298; Stone 1966:210).
