Yagan language

The Yagán language or Yámana, also mentioned in the literature as háusi kúta, inchikut, tekeenika, yahgan or yappu, was the language of the Yagans, a nomadic Amerindian people who lived on the islands and channels of the extreme south of Chile and Argentina. It is an extinct isolated language, since at present only one (advanced) speaker of this language was known: Cristina Calderón, born on May 24, 1928, who lived in the Chilean town of Villa Ukika, in the vicinity of Puerto Williams (Isla Navarino), who died on February 16, 2022 at the age of 93.

Denominations

Cristina Calderón, the last talk of the yagán.

Of the names given to its speakers, the best known is "yagán" (from English Yahgan), invented by the colonizing missionary of Ushuaia, Thomas Bridges:

Tell these natives the name Yahgan because it was appropriate. The Murray Strait, near which our mission was established and called by the Native Yahga, can be considered the center of its territory and the language as it is spoken there is the one that I learned and this is its purest form, being the one that is in the middle between its varieties spoken south, east and west. For the above reasons, Yahgan It seemed a proper name and is now known everywhere.

Alongside the name yagán, the term "yámana" (from yagán jámana, "man") to refer to the people and their language; but this term was not accepted by the last two speakers, because it meant "man/male", that is, only in its meaning of "male human being".

The name inchikut is a compound word whose first term seems to come from the English indian, then it would simply mean language of the Indians.

According to Adalberto Salas, the name háusi kúta (written by this author háusi kút~) is what the last speakers gave it.

History

Yagan was the southernmost language in the world and until the beginning of the XX century it was spoken in the southern coastal area of the island of Tierra del Fuego, and in the islands and channels between the Beagle Channel and Cape Horn. In 1886, a small population speaking this language was also recorded in the Malvinas archipelago, in a mission on Vigía or Keppel Island.^{[citation required]}

It has been described as a language with a very broad lexicon, but there is no agreement among linguists about its relationship with other languages, and although it remains considered an isolated language, attempts have been made to relate it to other languages of the Fuegian area, such as Kawésqar or Chono, the Chon languages and with more geographically distant languages such as Mapudungun.^{[citation required]}

The way of life of the current Yagans was similar to that of the rural population of any other origin in the extreme south of Argentina or Chile, in no way different from that of the emigrated population, especially from Chiloé, to that area. In 1972 only two elderly people, Felipe Álvarez and Benito Sarmiento, were willing to provide information about their language and from them it was learned that another 5 or 7 knew it, that among the other members of the population some remembered only a few words, and that the younger ones were completely ignorant of her. Referring to the attitude of the Yámana, of not wanting to speak their language, Benito Sarmiento affirmed:

It is that it is not forgotten, but by pride they leave it, for I have said many times, I cannot pride myself; I forget yahgán, I will always keep talking yahgán, until I die.

(Benito Sarmiento —died in 1975— lived completely alone in the Mejillones cove, about 28 km west of Puerto Williams. In Mejillones, around 1930, some small houses were built for the indigenous people that are currently completely uninhabited.) His attitude was an exception, both the Yámanas and the Kawésqar are reluctant to speak their languages in front of strangers.

In 2006 there was only one native speaker left, Cristina Calderón, who after the death of her sister Úrsula, had no chance to speak her language with other people. She found herself engaged in the creation of a dictionary to preserve all the lexicon that she remembers, it is unknown if it was finalized, since Cristina died in 2022.

Phonology

Bridges and other Yámana language researchers have proposed different phonological systems for the language. The alphabet that is used today to transcribe it distinguishes 7 vowels and 16 consonants, although there is a study by Poblete y Salas that indicates that there would be 18 consonants. In contrast, the dialect or stage of the language documented by Bridges had a greater number of consonants, since there was an opposition between voiceless voices such as /p/ and /t/ and voiced voices such as /b/ and /d/.^{[ citation required]}

Vowels

The following table shows the 7 vowels of the language. For its written representation in the Official Alphabet, the same signs used in the International Phonetic Alphabet are used, with the exception of the central middle vowel which is written ö.

Consonants

Pronunciation

Grammar

It was a highly agglutinative language, of SOV order and nominative-accusative alignment. It lacked an article and grammatical gender, but it distinguished in singular, dual and plural number. It had 6 cases: nominative, accusative, dative, locative and instrumental, locative suffixes and prefixes, verbalizers, benefactive, predicative, orientation, direction, nominalization, among others.

The verb was conjugated in three modes: indicative, imperative, subjunctive. Also had:

Person: first, second and third,

Voice: causative, reflexive, reciprocal and passive.

Time: present, near past, distant past, near future and distant future

Aspect: continuative, durative and imprecise

Number: singular, dual and plural.

The plural form of the verbs had different suffixes depending on whether they were collective, paucal, intransitive, objective, among others; however, many did not have a suffix and were totally irregular.

A notable feature is that it was one of the few languages in the Americas to use verbal serialization.

Examples of Vocabulary

Some words are included in the list.