Guanche is an

extinct language An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if the language has no living descendants. In contrast, a dead language is one that is no longer the native language of any community, even if it is still in use, li ...

that was spoken by the

Guanches The Guanches were the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean some west of Africa. It is believed that they may have arrived on the archipelago some time in the first millennium BCE. The Guanches were the only nativ ...

of the

Canary Islands The Canary Islands (; es, Canarias, ), also known informally as the Canaries, are a Spanish autonomous community and archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, in Macaronesia. At their closest point to the African mainland, they are west of Morocc ...

until the 16th or 17th century. It died out after the

conquest of the Canary Islands The conquest of the Canary Islands by the Crown of Castille took place between 1402 and 1496 and described as the first instance of European settler colonialism in Africa. It can be divided into two periods: the Conquista señorial, carried out ...

as the Guanche ethnic group was assimilated into the dominant

Spanish culture The culture of ''Spain'' is based on a variety of historical influences, primarily based on the culture of ancient Rome, Spain being a prominent part of the Greco-Roman world for centuries, the very name of Spain comes from the name that the Rom ...

. The Guanche language is known today through sentences and individual words that were recorded by early geographers, as well as through several place-names and some Guanche words that were retained in the Canary Islanders' Spanish.

Classification

Guanche has not been classified with any certainty. Many

linguists Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

propose that Guanche was likely a

Berber language The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight,, ber, label=Tuareg Tifinagh, ⵜⵎⵣⵗⵜ, ) are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related languages spoken by Berber commun ...

, or at least related to the Berber languages. However, recognizable Berber words are primarily agricultural or livestock vocabulary, whereas no Berber grammatical inflections have been identified, and there is a large stock of vocabulary that does not bear any resemblance to Berber whatsoever. It may be that Guanche had a stratum of Berber vocabulary but was otherwise unrelated to Berber.Maarten Kossmann
Berber subclassification (preliminary version)
Leiden (2011) Other strong similarities to the Berber languages are reflected in their counting system, while some authors suggest the Canarian branch would be a sister branch to the surviving continental Berber languages, splitting off during the early development of the language family and before the ''terminus post quem'' for the origin of Proto-Berber.

History

The name ''Guanche'' originally referred to a "man from

Tenerife Tenerife (; ; formerly spelled ''Teneriffe'') is the largest and most populous island of the Canary Islands. It is home to 43% of the total population of the archipelago. With a land area of and a population of 978,100 inhabitants as of Janu ...

", and only later did it come to refer to all native inhabitants of the

. Different dialects of the

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

were spoken across the

archipelago An archipelago ( ), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands, or sometimes a sea containing a small number of scattered islands. Examples of archipelagos include: the Indonesian Archi ...

. Archaeological finds on the Canaries include both

Libyco-Berber The Libyco-Berber alphabet or the Libyc alphabet (modern Berber name: ''Agemmay Alibu-Maziɣ'') is an abjad writing system that was used during the first millennium BC by various Berber peoples of North Africa and the Canary Islands, to write an ...

and

Punic The Punic people, or western Phoenicians, were a Semitic people in the Western Mediterranean who migrated from Tyre, Phoenicia to North Africa during the Early Iron Age. In modern scholarship, the term ''Punic'' – the Latin equivalent of the ...

inscriptions in rock carvings, although early accounts stated the Guanches themselves did not possess a system of writing. The first reliable account of the Guanche language was provided by the Genovese explorer Nicoloso da Recco in 1341, with a list of the numbers 1–19, possibly from

Fuerteventura Fuerteventura () is one of the Canary Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean, part of the North Africa region, and politically part of Spain. It is located away from the northwestern coast of Africa. The island was declared a biosphere reserve by UNES ...

. Recco's account reveals a

base-10 The decimal numeral system (also called the base-ten positional numeral system and denary or decanary) is the standard system for denoting integer and non-integer numbers. It is the extension to non-integer numbers of the Hindu–Arabic numeral ...

counting system with strong similarities to Berber

numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

. Silbo, originally a whistled form of Guanche speech used for communicating over long distances, was used on

La Gomera La Gomera () is one of Spain's Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. With an area of , it is the third smallest of the eight main islands of this archipelago. It belongs to the province of Santa Cruz de Tene ...

El Hierro El Hierro, nicknamed ''Isla del Meridiano'' (the "Meridian Island"), is the second-smallest and farthest-south and -west of the Canary Islands (an autonomous community of Spain), in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa, with a populatio ...

, and

Gran Canaria Gran Canaria (, ; ), also Grand Canary Island, is the third-largest and second-most-populous island of the Canary Islands, an archipelago off the Atlantic coast of Northwest Africa which is part of Spain. the island had a population of that co ...

. As the Guanche language became extinct, a

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

version of Silbo was adopted by some inhabitants of the

Numerals

Guanche numerals are attested from several sources, not always in good agreement (Barrios 1997). Some of the discrepancies may be due to copy errors, some to

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...

distinctions, and others to

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

borrowings in later elicitations. Recco's early 1341 record notably uses Italian-influenced spelling. * Also ,' an apparent copy error. Similarly with for expected *. Later attestations of 11–19 were formed by linking the digit and ten with ''-ir'': etc. 20–90 were similar, but contracted: etc. 100 was , apparently 10 with the Berber plural ''-en''. Recco only recorded 1–16; the combining forms for 11–16, which did not have this ''-ir-'', are included as the hyphenated forms in the table above.

does not distinguish and , so ''been'' is consistent with *veen. The Berber feminine ends in ''-t'', as in Shilha 1: ''yan'' (m), ''yat'' (f); 2: ''sin'' (m), ''snat'' (f), and this may explain discrepancies such as ''been'' and ''vait'' for 'one'. Cairasco is a misparsed counting song, . ''Ses'' ' 6' may have got lost in the middle of ( ← *). Starting with Cedeño, new roots for ' 2' and ' 9' appear ('9' perhaps the old root for ' 4'), new roots for ' 4' and ' 5' (''arba, kansa'') appear to be Arabic borrowings, and old ' 5', ' 6', ' 7' offset to ' 6', ' 7', ' 8'.

Vocabulary

Below are selected Guanche vocabulary items from a 16th-century list by

Alonso de Espinosa Alonso de Espinosa (1543–?) was a Spanish priest and historian of the sixteenth century. He was the first official historian of the island of Tenerife. Little is known of his early life. He is first heard of towards the end of the sixteenth cent ...

, as edited and translated by

Clements Robert Markham Sir Clements Robert Markham (20 July 1830 – 30 January 1916) was an English geographer, explorer and writer. He was secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) between 1863 and 1888, and later served as the Society's president fo ...

(1907): : Below are some additional basic vocabulary words in various Guanche dialects, from Wölfel (1965):Wölfel, Dominik Josef. 1965. ''Monumenta linguae Canariae: Die kanarischen Sprachdenkmäler''. Graz, Austria:

Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt :''There also were unrelated publishing houses in Stuttgart and in (East-)Berlin, and there is the (JAVG).'' The Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt (ADEVA) is an Austrian book publisher in Graz that specialises primarily in publishing lavis ...

. :

References

External links

José Barrios: Sistemas de numeración y calendarios de las poblaciones bereberes de Gran Canaria y Tenerife en los siglos XIV-XV
(PhD Dissertation, 1997)
Gerhard Böhm: Monumentos de la Lengua Canaria e Inscripciones Líbicas
(Department of African Studies, University of Vienna - Occasional Paper No. 4 / February 2006) {{DEFAULTSORT:Guanche Language Berber languages Canarian culture Extinct languages of Spain Medieval languages Guanche Unclassified languages of Africa Unclassified languages of Europe Extinct languages of Africa Languages extinct in the 17th century