Lencan is a small family of nearly extinct indigenous
Mesoamerican languages
Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador and Nicaragua. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic ...
.
Languages
There are two attested Lencan languages, both extinct (Campbell 1997:167).
![NATIVE AMERICAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF EL SALVADOR IN CENTRAL AMERICA ISTHMUS](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/NATIVE_AMERICAN_INDIGENOUS_PEOPLE_OF_EL_SALVADOR_IN_CENTRAL_AMERICA_ISTHMUS.png)
*
Salvadoran Lencan was spoken in
Chilanga and
Potó (thus the alternative language name Potón).
Lencans had arrived in El Salvador about 2,000 years B.P. and founded the site of
Quelepa
Quelepa is an important archaeological site located in eastern El Salvador. Generally considered to have been settled by the Lenca people, the site was founded around 400 BC in the Late Preclassic period (500 BC - AD 250). The inhabitants cons ...
. One speaker remains.
*
Honduran Lencan was spoken with minor dialect differences in
Intibucá,
Opatoro,
Guajiquiro,
Similatón (modern
Cabañas), and
Santa Elena. Some phrases survive; it is not known if the entire language still exists.
The languages are not closely related; Swadesh (1967) estimated 3,000 years since separation. Arguedas Cortés (1987) reconstructs Proto-Lencan with 12 consonants (including
ejective
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...
s) and 5 vowels.
External relationships
The external relationships of the Lencan languages are disputed. Inclusion within
Macro-Chibchan
Macro-Chibchan is a proposed grouping of the languages of the Lencan, Misumalpan, and Chibchan families into a single large phylum (macrofamily).
History
The Lencan and Misumalpan languages were once included in the Chibchan family proper, but ...
has often been proposed; Campbell (1987) reported that he found no solid evidence for such a connection, but Constenla-Umaña (2005) proposed regular correspondence between Lencan,
Misumalpan
The Misumalpan languages (also Misumalpa or Misuluan) are a small family of languages spoken by indigenous peoples on the east coast of Nicaragua and nearby areas. The name "Misumalpan" was devised by John Alden Mason and is composed of syllables ...
, and Chibchan.
Campbell (2012) acknowledges that these claims of connection between Lencan, Misumalpan, and Chibchan have not yet been proved systematically, but he notes that Constenla-Umaña (2005) "presented evidence to support a relationship with two neighboring families
f languages
F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''.
His ...
Misumalpan and Lencan, which constitute the Lenmichí Micro-Phylum. According to
onstenla-Umaña's study (2005) the Lenmichi Micro-Phylum first split into Proto-Chibchan and Proto-Misulencan, the common intermediate ancestor of the Lencan and the Misumalpan languages. This would have happened around 9,726 years before the present or 7,720 B.C. (the average of the time depths between the Chibchan languages and the Misulencan languages)...The respective subancestors of the Lencan and the Misumalpan languages would have separated around 7,705 before the present (5,069 B.C.), and Paya and the other intermediate ancestors of all the other Chibchan languages would have separated around 6,682 (4,676 B.C.)."
Another proposal by Lehmann (1920:727) links Lencan with the
Xincan language family, though Campbell (1997:167) rejects most of Lehmann's twelve lexical comparisons as invalid. An automated computational analysis (
ASJP
The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...
4) by Müller et al. (2013)
[Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ]
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. also found lexical similarities between Lencan and
Xincan. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
History
The Proto-Lencan homeland was most likely in central Honduras (Campbell 1997:167).
At the time of the Spanish conquest of Central America in the early 16th century, the Lenca language was spoken by the
Lenca people
The Lenca or Lepawiran "people of the jaguar" are from present day southwest Honduras and eastern El Salvador in Central America. They once spoke many Dialects such as Chilanga, Putun, Kotik etc. Although there were different dialects, they un ...
in a region that incorporated northwestern and southwestern Honduras, and neighboring eastern
El Salvador
El Salvador (; , meaning " The Saviour"), officially the Republic of El Salvador ( es, República de El Salvador), is a country in Central America. It is bordered on the northeast by Honduras, on the northwest by Guatemala, and on the south b ...
, east of the
Lempa river
The Lempa River ( es, Río Lempa) is a river in Central America.
Geography
Its sources are located in between the Sierra Madre and the Sierra del Merendón in southern Guatemala, near the town of Olopa. In Guatemala the river is called ''Río O ...
. While the
Lenca people
The Lenca or Lepawiran "people of the jaguar" are from present day southwest Honduras and eastern El Salvador in Central America. They once spoke many Dialects such as Chilanga, Putun, Kotik etc. Although there were different dialects, they un ...
continue to live in the same region today,
Lyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in ...
reported in the 1970s that he found only one speaker of the language in
Chilanga,
El Salvador
El Salvador (; , meaning " The Saviour"), officially the Republic of El Salvador ( es, República de El Salvador), is a country in Central America. It is bordered on the northeast by Honduras, on the northwest by Guatemala, and on the south b ...
, and none in
Honduras
Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. The republic of Honduras is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Oce ...
. Campbell also concluded that Salvadoran Lenca was a distinct language from Honduran Lenca.
Indigenous movements in both countries are attempting to revive the language, and recent press reports from Honduras indicate that elementary school textbooks in Salvadoran Lenca have been distributed to public schools in the region.
A 2002 novel by
Roberto Castillo, ''La guerra mortal de los sentidos'', chronicles the adventures of the "Searcher for the Lenca Language."
Proto-language
Proto-Lenca reconstructions by Arguedas (1988):
[Arguedas Cortés, Gilda Rosa. 1988. Los Fonemas Segmentales del Protolenca: Reconstrucción Comparativa. ''Filología y lingüística'' XIV. 89-109.]
:
References
Bibliography
* Campbell, Lyle. 1997. ''American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America''. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
*Campbell, Lyle. 2012. ''The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide.'' De Gruyter Mouton: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston.
* Constenla Umaña, Adolfo. (1981). Comparative Chibchan Phonology. (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia).
* Constenla Umaña, Adolfo. (1991). ''Las lenguas del Área Intermedia: Introducción a su estudio areal''. Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, San José.
* Constenla Umaña, Adolfo. (1995). Sobre el estudio diacrónico de las lenguas chibchenses y su contribución al conocimiento del pasado de sus hablantes. ''Boletín del Museo del Oro'' 38-39: 13-56.
* Constenla Umaña, Adolfo (2005). "Existe relacion genealogica entre las lenguas misumalpas y las chibchenses?" ''Estudios de Linguistica Chibcha''. 23: 9–59.
* Fabre, Alain. 2005. ''Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: LENCA''
* Hemp, Eric. 1976. "On Earlier Lenca Vowels". ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 42(1): 78-79.
* Lehman, Walter. 1920. ''Zentral-Amerika''. see pp. 700–719 (Salvadoran Lenca) and pp. 668–692 (Honduran Lenca).
External links
OLAC resources in and about the Lenca languagefrom th
at the
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a digital repository housed in LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin. AILLA is a digital language archive dedicated to the digi ...
.
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Languages
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 ...
Macro-Chibchan languages
Language families
Indigenous languages of Central America
Mesoamerican languages
Languages of El Salvador
Languages of Honduras
Extinct languages of North America