Chono is a poorly attested extinct language of confusing classification. It is attested primarily from an 18th-century catechism, which is not translated into Spanish. Various placenames in
Chiloé Archipelago
The Chiloé Archipelago (, , ) is a group of islands lying off the coast of Chile, in the Los Lagos Region. It is separated from mainland Chile by the Chacao Channel in the north, the Sea of Chiloé in the east and the Gulf of Corcovado in the s ...
have Chono etymologies, despite the main indigenous language of the archipelago at the
arrival of the Spanish being
Veliche.
Classification
Campbell (2012) concludes that the language called Chono or Wayteka or Wurk-wur-we by Llaras Samitier (1967) is spurious, with the source material being a list of mixed and perhaps invented vocabulary.
Viegas Barros, who postulates a relationship between
Kawesqar and
Yaghan, believes that 45% of the Chono vocabulary and grammatical forms correspond to one of those languages, though it is not close to either.
''
Glottolog
''Glottolog'' is an open-access online bibliographic database of the world's languages. In addition to listing linguistic materials ( grammars, articles, dictionaries) describing individual languages, the database also contains the most up-to-d ...
'' concludes that "There are lexical parallels with Mapuche as well as Qawesqar, ... but the core is clearly unrelated." They characterize Chono as a "
language isolate
A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi ...
", which corresponds to an
unclassified language
An unclassified language is a language whose genetic affiliation to other languages has not been established. Languages can be unclassified for a variety of reasons, mostly due to a lack of reliable data but sometimes due to the confounding inf ...
in other classifications.
Samitier (1967) word list
The following list of Chono (Wayteka) words, as spoken in the
Gulf of Penas, is from Samitier (1967).
[Samitier, Liaras. 1967. El grupo chono o wayteka y los demas pueblos fuegopatagonia. ''Runa'' 10. 1-2:123-94 (Buenos Aires).] It was later found to be spurious by Campbell (2012).
References
External links
*
Chono works at
Wikisource
Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content source text, textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one f ...
{{Languages of Chile
Extinct languages of South America
Indigenous languages of South America
Language isolates of South America