Among labyrinthine southern archipelagos —where the winds, the rains and the cold give no respite—, the Kawésqar lived.
The nomadic group spent much of the day in their canoes (or hallef) touring the canals between the Gulf of Penas and the Strait of Magellan, surrounded by dense forests and in search of sea lions, otters, birds and molluscs to feed on.
The men were responsible for hunting on land (which included the iconic huemul) and at sea, while the women gathered shellfish by diving, for which they covered their skin with sea lion fat.
Like the rest of the native peoples that populated America thousands of years ago, The Kawésqar had their own language, deeply marked by their geography. That explains, for example, why they had 32 ways to say “here.”
But with the passage of time and the arrival of settlers in this southern part of Chile, called Western Patagonia, the ethnic group underwent a brutal transformation: not only did they abandon their nomadic life —settled in Puerto Edén, a small village located south of the Gulf of Penas—but also relegated their language to the background.
And it is that learning Spanish became a necessity for them and, little by little, a critical point was reached: today, only eight people speak their original language.
Four of them are elderly. Three were born in the 1960s — the last generation to acquire the language from childhood — and only one, who is not a member of the ethnic group, speaks it: Oscar Aguilera.
The 72-year-old Chilean ethnolinguist has been trying to save this language for almost 50 years, registering the vocabulary, recording sound files for hours and documenting the lexicon.
Now there is another person who is not from the community interested in learning your grammar: the couple of the next president Gabriel Boric and future first lady, Irina Karamanos.
The feminist leader has contacted Aguilera in order to investigate more on the subject. For her, Chileans have a “poor” relationship with their communities and indigenous peoples, and learning from their lexicon is a way of getting closer to them.
But What particularities does this native language have? What is its origin and its most important characteristics?
Here we explain it.
What is the origin of language?
Linguists and researchers always try to answer the same question: where do the languages of peoples come from, what is their true origin?
In the case of Kawésqar—as well as many other indigenous languages—the answer is not yet clear.
This is explained in part because it is considered an “isolate” or “unclassified” language.
That is to say, it is not part of a linguistic family nor does it have links with any other living language (as it does, for example, Spanish, which comes from Latin and is part of the Romance languages).
being “isolated” it is more difficult to discover where their words come from, their structure or their grammar.
Although the Kawéskar are believed to have inhabited Western Patagonia about 10,000 years ago, the first known testimony of their language appears only between the years 1688 and 1689, prepared by the French adventurer Jean de la Guilbaudière.
According to the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, by the 19th century its population reached 4,000 people, and most spoke the ancestral language.
At the end of the 19th century, however, its population fell sharply to 500 people, and then to 150 in the 1920s.
At the moment, There are about 250 Kawéskar in the Magallanes region, but they are monolingual—they speak only Spanish—and do not speak the language of their ancestors.
What features does it have?
Due to its morphological characteristics, Kawéskar is an agglutinative language (like Turkish and others) and polysynthetic; that is, it has “words, sentences or phrases” that cannot be translated into Spanish with a single word.
“There is not a one-to-one equivalence, like, for example, the English table and the Spanish ‘table.’ , explains Oscar Aguilera to BBC Mundo.
Despite the extensive contact of the Kawésqar with the settlers, they are reluctant to accept loanwords from the Spanish. Thus, they have created their own words to call, for example, the devices they have been acquiring (such as the television or the telephone).
The few words that have been adopted from Spanish have undergone a “nativization”; that is, a transformation to Kawéskar phonetics.
It is the example of “ship”, which is said jemmáse but also wárko. The “b” in Spanish is replaced by the “w”, since there is no “b” sound in kawésqar.
In addition, there is a cultural side that, according to Aguilera, “differs markedly from the way we express ourselves.”
“If the Kawésqar is not sure of what he is saying, he does not say it. He always uses the conditional. Culturally, they reject lack of truthfulness, it is sanctioned by the group. The person who lies points the finger at them,” he explains.
For example, the kawésqar would never say that such a person called them from London. Since they are not sure that person was in London (because they don’t see him), they would say “he would have called me” from London.
Because it is in danger of extinction?
Being spoken by only eight people, it is among the languages that UNESCO considers to be in danger of extinction.
“The problem is that, in general terms, it is not a practical language. It is better to learn Spanish or study English,” says Aguilera.
According to the expert, one of the reasons that explains why the Spanish penetrated so strongly among the Kawésqar is the commercialization of their products with the new inhabitants of the area.
In addition, according to the specialist, they felt discriminated against by the surrounding towns, such as the Chilotes (inhabitants of the island of Chiloé).
“The Chilotes looked down on them and even laughed at how they spoke their language. So they decided not to speak their language in public anymore, but only at home,” explains the linguist.
The State of Chile has not prioritized their rescue or survival either. To this day there are not enough incentives to revitalize the language. The only school in Puerto Edén, for example, teaches in Spanish.
“There are some people who are making an effort to learn the language, but the lack of continuity and persistence, in addition to being a language that is grammatically so different from Spanish, makes it difficult for them,” says Aguilera.
The fascinating story of Oscar Aguilera
In the winter of 1975, Oscar Aguilera embarked on an adventure that would change his life forever.
Being an inexperienced young man, recently graduated from Classical, Germanistic and Linguistic Philology at the University of Chile, he decided to travel to Puerto Edén, the place where the Kawésqar currently live.
“I was very impressed because they had painted a completely different picture for me. I imagined that I would meet people dressed in skins, almost in rags, and living in iconic huts. But no, they lived in ordinary houses, and they dressed just like me,” she says.
On that trip —which lasted throughout the winter— he met the Tonko family, who helped him start recording the language, sharing long days of recording with him.
The following year, he published a first lexicon that lasts to this day.
Aguilera’s fascination with the Kawésqar was such that she always found reasons to return.
And that is how he decided to embark on a second expedition, from which he returned with two members of the community to his home in Santiago, where he lived with his parents and grandmother.
“They were living with us for four months. My family received them well, they accepted them,” he says.
Aguilera was at that time a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chile.
Every afternoon, when classes were over, he stayed with the two kawésqar recording part of their lexicon and recording ethnographic information.
Then, they all returned together to Puerto Eden.
“I liked going because the language of a community has a very important cultural component. So I dedicated myself not only to saving the language but also to the cultural rescue that implies much more, the whole way of life and their own testimony “, Explain.
Most of the Kawéskar he met on those trips spoke Spanish but with varying degrees of proficiency. The oldest, for example, used to have more interference from their mother tongue, making mistakes such as not differentiating between the singular and the plural.
The academic acknowledges that he fell in love with his people.
“I did the opposite of what the textbooks recommended to a researcher: ‘You get information, describe the language and go away’. I got involved with the community,” he says.
“Mutual Adoption”
In the 1980s, the relationship between Oscar Aguilera and the Kawésqar deepened further when he decided to adopt two children from the community to receive a good education in Santiago.
The children belonged to the Tonko family. In total, there were eight brothers. One of them, José, loved reading.
“With the permission of his parents, I bought him a ticket to Puerto Montt and I went to look for him to go to Santiago. He entered school, the Alessandri Lyceum, where I had also studied,” he says.
Four years later, José’s brother, Juan Carlos, also went to live in Santiago with Aguilera. They all lived together in a house that the academic rented in the Providencia district.
“I adopted them. It is that his family had been very good to me, they always received me as if I were part of them. So it was actually a mutual adoption.”
When they turned 18, José and Juan Carlos entered university. The first studied Social Work and Anthropology, and the second, journalism.
“They are my family”
Currently, the brothers – who are around 60 years old – live in the city of Punta Arenas, as does Aguilera, who teaches six courses at the University of Magallanes.
“To this day they are my family. It is as if they were my children, they take care of me and I take care of them.”
Both have worked with him in the arduous afternoon of rescuing the language.
José is co-author of different publications —such as “Gente de los canals” (2019)—, and has collaborated in the creation of a Kawésqar-Spanish dictionary, which they have not yet finished.
In addition, between 2007 and 2010, they wrote a text and a sound file that is now at the University of Texas, in Austin, United States, and at James Cook University, in Australia.
However, the linguist believes that much remains to be done.
“Behind the languages there is a great deal of knowledge and that is why they must be preserved, because they harbor unique information about the environment where the people who speak it live,” he says.
For the future of the language, his hope is pinned on the future first lady, Irina Karamanos.
Perhaps his interest, he says, will really help revitalize the language of those he considers his true family.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-60377613, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-04-27 11:10:05
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