Selkʼnam language

Within the Southern Chon language family, Selkʼnam is closest to Haush, 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 Selkʼnam people, also known as the Ona, are an Indigenous people who inhabited the northeastern part of the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego 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 South America 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. == 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. Consonants ==Grammar==

The Ona language is an object–verb–subject language (OVS). This is a rare word order: 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 and English, such as the word for , in Selkʼnam, ; from the Spanish word , which translates to . Comparative vocabulary The following is a list of examples of comparative vocabulary from Chonan languages: Selkʼnam, Haush and Tehuelche; and also vocabulary from the unrelated Yahgan (Yámana). == See also ==