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Selk’nam:
The Lost Language of
Like many
other parts of the
People and History
- General Information
-Selk’nam
Language Extinction
-Current
state of Selk’nam
Language
-Language Family
-Morpho-Syntax
-Sounds of Selk’nam
-Orthography
Why?
This webpage was
created by Samantha Ross
Last
Update: 12/19/2006
The Selk’nam People
-General
Information: The
Selk’nam people, also known as the Ona, were land-based nomads, wandering an
area that included the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, as well as the extreme
southern tip of mainland
One of their most famous traditions
was that of the “Hain”, a
coming-of-age ceremony for young men.
The initiates, known as kloketen,
would enter a darkened tent and would soon be accosted by the terrifying
spirits that they had grown up fearing.
However, after a period of time, the boys would be told to unmask the
spirits, and much to their surprise, the horrifying spirits that they had
feared for all of their lives were simply their older male relatives, dressed
in traditional costumes, masks, and body-paint.
The older men would then tell the younger initiates the story of how
Selk’nam men used to be subjugated by women dressed as those same spirits. The men then revolted, and took the
spirit-imitating power from the women, thereby dominating over them. The secret of the Hain was passed down from
man to man, generation to generation.
The following photos were taken at the only Hain ever photographed, and
the last ever performed, in 1923.
(http://www.serindigena.cl/territorios/selknam/imprimir_selknam.htm)
-Selk’nam
Language Extinction: The Selk’nam extermination was a particularly
speedy, harsh, and cruel end to a fascinating people. When the Selk’nam people encountered
Europeans for the first time around 1880, there were about 3,500 to 4,000
Selk’nam[1]. However, when it was discovered that the
ancestral Selk’nam land bore gold and was appropriate for sheepherding,
European settlers flooded into the area, displacing the Selk’nam and even
killing them if they got too close to their property. Mercenaries were often paid by how many sets
of Selk’nam testicles they brought to their superiors[2]. Furthermore, soon after contact with Europeans,
Salesian Missions and Schools opened up near the settlement of
“Dead-dead-dead. How
many dead? Look at the cemetery - it is full. So many died, every day. Trucks
would go by full of the dead. They all died of koliot-kwaki [Whiteman's
sickness] - babies with their mothers, the poor things. They suffered - young
girls not yet married, young men. The cemetery is large.[4]”
Lola Kiepja, the last Selk’nam shaman, died in
1966. The last pure-blooded Selk’nam,
Angela Loij, passed away in 1974.
According to Ethnologue, there were still between one and three speakers
of the language left as of 1991 (although they are, or were, not full-blooded
Selk’nam). Sadly, there are no more
recent figures on the state of Selk’nam, and the language is likely
extinct. However, there are sources that
say that the last speakers passed away in the 1980s[5]. It seems that, unlike the case of Ned
Mandrell of Manx and Tevfik Esenç of
Ubykh, the last speaker of Selk’nam may pass on uncelebrated or unnoticed, if
he or she has not already done so.
Angela Loij in
1923. Angela, the last full-blooded Selk’nam,
passed away in 1974.
(http://www.rism.org/chapman/angela_photos.htm)
At
this point, it seems that there are not enough Selk’nam for full language
revival to successfully take place.
There have been no known efforts to revive the language, either.
The
Selk’nam Language
Language Family:
-Language Family: Selk’nam is one of the three or four members of the
Chon language family, the others being Tehuelche (also known as Aonikenk), which
is spoken by about four speakers in southern Argentina
-Morpho-syntax: Selk’nam is
an object-verb-subject language, as seen in the example:
yEpr
t'E:n hanş t'elqn
meat
eat CU girl
“The girl usually eats meat.”[6]
Selk’nam
also involves many other interesting linguistic characteristics, including a
complex deictic structure. There are
specific spots for position, plurality (of which there is a distinction between
“general plural” and “collective plural”), distance, cardinal direction (of
which there are five cardinal directions: north, south, west, east towards the
heights, and east towards the plains), presence versus absence, and finally the
noun. One example of this complex structure
would be:
pem
Ey /Ah na/
seated south behind woman
“that woman seated to the south”[7]
Selk’nam,
like Tehuelche and Gününa
Yajich, is a language in which the
adjectives occur postnominally.
-Sounds of Selk’nam: In terms of phonological structure, Selk’nam has 19
consonants (fifteen of which are voiceless), two semivowels, and six
vowels. They are arranged as follows:
|
|
Labial |
Dental |
Apical |
Palatal |
Velar |
Uvular |
Laryngeal |
|
Plain
Stops |
p |
t |
|
č |
k |
q |
/ |
|
Glottalized
Stops |
p' |
t' |
|
|
k' |
q' |
|
|
Fricatives |
|
s |
ş |
š |
x |
|
h |
|
Nasals |
m |
n |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Laterals |
|
l |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Vibrants |
|
|
r |
|
|
|
|
|
Glides |
w |
|
|
y |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Front |
Central |
Back |
|
High |
Close |
e |
|
o |
|
|
Open |
E |
|
Ť |
|
Low |
Close |
|
a |
|
|
|
Open |
|
A |
|
(Tables from Adelaar, page 559, which
is based on Najlis’s 1973 study)
Something
interesting about Selk’nam phonology is the alternation between /r/ and
/l/. In some cases, they are in free
variation, in other cases, they vary between Selk’nam regional speech, and in
yet other cases, they could cause differentiation between words, but those two
words would have similar or related meanings.
For example:
o:tr = o:tl ”eye”
/Ť:sr (central
and southern Selk’nam) = /Ť:sl (northern
Selk’nam) “forehead”
|
wer ”foam” |
wel ”saliva, phlegm” |
|
ur ”peak, point” |
ul ”nose” |
|
tEr ”finger” |
tel ”little finger” |
-Orthography: There was no Selk’nam orthography before the
arrival of Europeans in the 1880, and so the Roman alphabet was adopted. This was likely done by either the Salesian
Missionaries in the area, or one of the many anthropologists or linguists that
passed through the area while the Selk’nam were still speaking their
language.
Why?
The Selk’nam language, like the other
languages in Chilean and Argentinean Tierra del Fuego, were wiped almost
entirely off the face of the earth within a century of their first sustained
contact with Europeans. The Chono, the
Selk’nam, the Haush, the Gününa Küne, and the Tehue people have all assimilated
or disappeared, taking their languages with them, and the Kawesqar, Yahgan, and
Tehuelche languages are hanging on by a thread
(for example, there is only one remaining speaker of Yahgan, the elderly
Cristina Calderón). However, not all
languages of southern
Mapudungun, the native language of the Mapuche
people, is still spoken by about half a million people, with about 200,000 of
those speakers considered fluent[9]. At most recent count, there are approximately
one million people in both
The question is: why is Mapudungun
succeeding after all this time while the Fuegian languages tapered off so quickly? European conquistadores first encountered the
Mapuche people in the mid-16th century, with the explorations of
Diego de Almagro and Pedro de Valdivia, yet Mapudungun is still spoken and
understood by so many people that Microsoft has even created a version of
Windows using Mapudungun. White settlers
encountered the Fuegian tribes in the late 19th century, and now most
of them are gone, with only a few photos and anthropological studies to mark
their presence.
There are a few theories for why
Selk’nam and its geographical peers have gone extinct, yet Mapudungun has
remained. One is that there was
immediate, sustained contact between the Fuegian tribes and Christian
missionaries (missions and mission schools were set up near the Argentinean settlement
of
Furthermore, the size of the Mapuche territory and
population, which is now sitting at about one million people, facilitates the maintenance
of the language. While most Mapuches are
bilingual in Spanish and Mapudungun, the presence of large Mapuche communities,
even in large cities, continues the use of the language and cultural traditions
(the photo below is of a Mapuche community center in
(A ruka,
or Mapuche community center, located in the La Pintana sector of
Finally,
the Chilean government, although it has not made Mapudungun an official national
language, has recently started to make steps to introduce Mapudungun (as well
as Aymara, Quechua, and Rapa Nui, the native language of Easter Island) into
the classrooms of indigenous communities, instead of just a monolingual Spanish
education. According to the Chilean
Minister of Education, Yasna Provoste Campilla, “The idea is to have a sub
sector in the area of language and communication that will allow the
introduction of indigenous languages into the classroom, in this way ensuring
their preservation.”[11] If this had been done with Selk’nam or other
minority languages of
Sources
1) Adelaar, Willem F. H. The Languages of the
2) Cooper, John M. Analytical and Critical Bibliography of
the Tribes of
3) Author(s) unknown.
Etnias Australes de Chile. Updated 2004. Memoria Chilena. Accessed
4)
Author(s) unknown.
Ser Indígena: Portal de las Culturas Originarias de Chile. Date of update unknown. ONG Comunidad Ser Indígena 12/10/06 http://www.serindigena.org/index.html
5) Bajas, María
Paz. “Montaje del álbum fotográfico de Tierra del Fuego. Date of post unknown. Revista
Chilena de Antropología Visual. Accessed
6) Chapman, Anne MacKaye. Anne MacKaye Chapman. Date of page unknown. Research Institute for the Study of
7) Fabre,
Alain. Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía
bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos.
8) "Mapudungun." Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia.
9) "Selknam." Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia.
10) Setterfield, Cate.