Chono language

Not to be confused with the Chonan languages or the spurious Wayteka language.

Chono is a poorly attested extinct language of confusing classification. It is attested primarily from an 18th-century catechism,^[1] which is not translated into Spanish. Various placenames in Chiloé Archipelago have Chono etymologies, despite the main indigenous language of the archipelago at the arrival of the Spanish being Veliche.^[2]

Chono
Native to	Chile
Region	Chonos Archipelago, Chiloé Archipelago
Ethnicity	Chono people
Extinct	1875[citation needed]
Language family	Language isolate
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	chon1248

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.^[3]

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.^[4]

Glottolog 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", which corresponds to an unclassified language in other classifications.^{[citation needed]}

Phonology

The phonology of Chono can be tentatively reconstructed in part from the data provided by Basauni (1975).^[5] Syllables are frequently, but not necessarily, closed. There are few consonant clusters but frequent vowel clusters.^[6]

Consonants

The consonant table shows the IPA representation as given by Adelaar (2004), with symbols that differ in angle brackets.^[7]

Conosnants^[8]

		Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m		n	nʲ ⟨ny⟩	ŋ
Plosive/Affricate	voiceless	p		t	t͡ɕ ⟨č⟩	k
	voiced	b				g
Fricative		f	z[a]	s		x	h
Approximant		w			j
Lateral				l	lʲ ⟨ly⟩

1. ⟨z⟩ may have been realized as [θ], [ts], [z], or [s], among other possible realizations.

Vowels

Vowels^[8]

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

In addition to the five monophthongs, Chono appears to have had eight diphthongs, which Adelaar represents as a vowel and a glide: ⟨aw⟩, ⟨ew⟩, ⟨ow⟩, ⟨ay⟩, ⟨yu⟩, ⟨wa⟩, ⟨we⟩, and ⟨wi⟩.^[8]