Ona (Aona), also known as Selk'nam (Shelknam), is a language that is spoken by the

Selk'nam people The Selk'nam, also known as the Onawo or Ona people, are an indigenous people in the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile, including the Tierra del Fuego islands. They were one of the last native groups in South America to be enco ...

Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego ( English: ''Big Island of the Land of Fire'') also formerly ''Isla de Xátiva''South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

. Part of the Chonan languages of

Patagonia Patagonia () refers to a geographical region that encompasses the southern end of South America, governed by Argentina and Chile. The region comprises the southern section of the Andes Mountains with lakes, fjords, temperate rainforests, and ...

, Selk'nam is almost extinct, due both to the late 19th-century Selk'nam genocide by

European immigrants European emigration is the successive emigration waves from the European continent to other continents. The origins of the various European diasporas can be traced to the people who left the European nation states or stateless ethnic communities ...

, high fatalities due to disease and disruption of traditional society. One source states that the last fluent native speakers died in the 1980s, A

Radboud University Radboud University (abbreviated as RU, nl, Radboud Universiteit , formerly ''Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen'') is a public research university located in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The university bears the name of Saint Radboud, a 9th century ...

linguist 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. Ling ...

worked with speaker Herminia Vera-Ona, who died in 2014, to write a reference grammar of the language.

Classification

Within the Southern Chon language family, Selk'nam is closest to Haush, another language spoken on the island of Tierra del Fuego. There is speculation that Chon together with the Moseten languages, a small group of languages in Bolivia, form part of a Moseten-Chonan language family. Another proposal is, that it is related to the Pano-Tacanan languages.

Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on M ...

classifies Selk'nan as an Amerind language of the Southern Andinan group.

History

The

, also known as the Ona'', are an

indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

who inhabited the northeastern part of the archipelago of

Tierra del Fuego Tierra del Fuego (, ; Spanish for "Land of the Fire", rarely also Fireland in English) is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of the main island, Isla ...

for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. They were nomads known as "foot-people," as they did their hunting on land, rather than being seafarers. The last full-blooded Selk'nam, Ángela Loij, died in 1974. They were one of the last aboriginal groups in

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

to be reached by Europeans. Their language, believed to be part of the Chonan family, is considered extinct as the last native speakers died in the 1980s. Currently, Selk'nam communities are revitalizing the language. A man of mixed Selk'nam and

Mapuche The Mapuche ( (Mapuche & Spanish: )) are a group of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of Patagonia. The collective term refers to a wide-ranging ethnicit ...

ancestry, Joubert Yanten Gomez (indigenous name: Keyuk) has successfully taught himself the language.

Phonology

Based on available data, Selk'nam seems to have had 3 vowels and 23 consonants. Selk'nam has three vowels: .

Grammar

The Ona language is an object–verb–subject language (OVS), this is a rare

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

(only 1% of languages use it as their default word order). There are only two word classes in Selk'nam: nouns and verbs.

References

External links

*Guillermo Latorre
Sustrato y superestrato multilingües en la toponimia del extremo sur de Chile
Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades de la Universidad Austral de Chile
WALSSelk'nam dictionary online
(select simple or advanced browsing).
Selknam
(

Intercontinental Dictionary Series The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (commonly abbreviated as IDS) is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary A ...

) {{Languages of Chile Chonan languages Extinct languages of South America Fuegian languages Object–verb–subject languages Selk'nam people Languages of Argentina Languages of Chile