Guanche is an

extinct language An extinct language or dead language is a language with no living native speakers. A dormant language is a dead language that still serves as a symbol of ethnic identity to an ethnic group; these languages are often undergoing a process of r ...

dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...

that was spoken by the

Guanches The Guanche were the Indigenous peoples, indigenous inhabitants of the Spain, Spanish Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean some to the west of modern Morocco and the North African coast. The islanders spoke the Guanche language, which i ...

of the

Canary Islands The Canary Islands (; ) or Canaries are an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean and the southernmost Autonomous communities of Spain, Autonomous Community of Spain. They are located in the northwest of Africa, with the closest point to the cont ...

until the 16th or 17th century. It died out after the conquest of the Canary Islands as the Guanche ethnic group was assimilated into the dominant Spanish culture. 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 propose that Guanche was likely a

Berber language The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who ar ...

, or at least genealogically related to the Berber languages to some extent as an Afroasiatic language. 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, an Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Spain. With a land area of and a population of 965,575 inhabitants as of A ...

", 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 that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

were spoken across the

archipelago An archipelago ( ), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands. An archipelago may be in an ocean, a sea, or a smaller body of water. Example archipelagos include the Aegean Islands (the o ...

. Archaeological finds on the Canaries include both Libyco-Berber and Punic 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. Recco's account reveals a base-10 counting system with strong similarities to

Berber Berber or Berbers may refer to: Ethnic group * Berbers, an ethnic group native to Northern Africa * Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages Places * Berber, Sudan, a town on the Nile People with the surname * Ady Berber (1913–196 ...

numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic 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, in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. With an area of , it is the third-smallest of the archipelago's eight main islands. It belongs to the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. La Gomer ...

, El Hierro,

, and

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

. As the Guanche language became extinct, a Spanish 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 social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

distinctions, and others to

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

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. Spanish 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, as edited and translated by Clements Robert Markham (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. :

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 Culture of the Canary Islands Extinct languages of Spain Medieval languages Guanche Unclassified languages of Africa Extinct languages of Africa Languages extinct in the 17th century