Selkʼnam, also known by the

exonym An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate them ...

Ona, is a language formerly spoken by the

Selkʼnam people The Selkʼnam, also known as the Onawo or Ona people, are an Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous people in the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile, including the Tierra del Fuego islands. They were one of the last nati ...

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'' is an island near the southern tip of South America from which it is separated by the Strait of Magellan. The western portion (61. ...

in southernmost

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

. One of the

Chonan languages The Chonan languages are a family of indigenous American languages which were spoken in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. Two Chon languages are well attested: Selkʼnam (or Ona), spoken by the people of the same name who occupied territory in t ...

Patagonia Patagonia () is a geographical region that includes parts of Argentina and Chile at the southern end of South America. The region includes the southern section of the Andes mountain chain with lakes, fjords, temperate rainforests, and glaciers ...

, Selkʼnam is now extinct, due to the late 19th-century Selkʼnam genocide by European immigrants, high fatalities due to disease, and disruption of traditional society. One source states that the last fluent native speakers died in the 1980s.

Radboud University Radboud University (abbreviated as RU, , formerly ) is a public research university located in Nijmegen, Netherlands. RU has seven faculties and more than 24,000 students. Established in 1923, Radboud University has consistently been included in ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia worked with two individuals to write a reference grammar of the language, namely, Herminia Vera-Ona (died 2014), a

semi-speaker Within the linguistic study of endangered languages, sociolinguists distinguish between different speaker types based on the type of competence they have acquired of the endangered language. Often when a community is gradually shifting away from a ...

who spoke Ona until the age of 8, and , a young man who started learning the language after learning he was part-Selkʼnam at the age of 8. At the time the grammar was written, the latter was believed to be the only living individual fluent in Selkʼnam, albeit not natively.

Classification

Within the Southern Chon language family, Selkʼnam is closest to

Haush The Haush or people were an Indigenous people who lived on the Mitre Peninsula of the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. They were related culturally and linguistically to the Selkʼnam (also known as Ona) people who also lived on the Isla Gran ...

, 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.

History

The

, also known as the Ona, are an

Indigenous people There is no generally accepted definition of Indigenous peoples, although in the 21st century the focus has been on self-identification, cultural difference from other groups in a state, a special relationship with their traditional territ ...

who inhabited the northeastern part of the archipelago of

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

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 Selkʼnam, Ángela Loij, died in 1974. They were one of the last aboriginal groups in

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, Selkʼnam communities are revitalizing the language. A man of mixed Selkʼnam and

Mapuche The Mapuche ( , ) also known as Araucanians 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 e ...

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

Phonology

Based on available data, Selkʼnam seems to have had 3 vowels and 23 consonants.

Vowels

Selkʼnam's three vowels were .

Tone

There was also a simple tone system, which Najlis (1973) analyzed as high and low tone, and Martini (1982) analyzed as

pitch accent A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch (music), pitch (tone (linguistics), linguistic tone) rather than by vol ...

Consonants

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 languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...

: only 1% of languages use it as their default word order. There are only two word classes in Selkʼnam: nouns and verbs.

Vocabulary

The Selkʼnam language has Chonan vocabulary similar to the Haush language, though some words have been adopted from

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 countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

and English, such as the word for "cat", in Selkʼnam, ''kʼlattítaŭ;'' from the Spanish word ''gatito'', which translates to "kitten".

Comparative vocabulary

The following is a list of examples of comparative vocabulary from Chonan languages: Selkʼnam,

and Tehuelche; and also vocabulary from the unrelated Yahgan (Yámana).

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
WALSSelkʼnam 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 An ...

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