Cristina Calderon, of Villa Ukika, outside Puerto Williams in Chile, is the last living speaker of Yagán, the language of the indigenous people of the same name. The language has been estimated to have been spoken in the area for at least 10,000 years. Calderon is not the last of the Yagán people, but most have abandoned the native language in favor of the more popular Spanish. Without someone else to take up the cause of preserving the language, Yagán is likely to become truly extinct with Calderon’s death. She is 91 years old.
Like most indigenous peoples, the Yagán were decimated upon the arrival of European settlers and explorers. Europeans diligently hunted whales and seals that the Yagán needed to survive, and missionaries bent on converting them to Christianity and teaching them to live in a more “civilized” manner brought diseases to which the Yagán had no immunity. Some of the Yagán were sent to the Falklands in the 1920s. As of 2002, there were about 1,600 Yagán in Chile.
Basics about the Yagán Language
The Yagán language and its speakers are also known as Yaghan or Yámana. The language is an isolate, meaning it has no known relatives among any other languages of the world.
The Yagán alphabet, with phonetic pronunciations and sound files, can be found here: http://www.uchile.cl/cultura/lenguas/yaganes/alfabeto.html (in Spanish)
Scroll down a bit on this page to find some examples of Yagán vocabulary: http://www.victory-cruises.com/felipeetc.html. There are also links to photos, commentary from early explorers to the area, and a few translated myths. (Probably NSFW in some cases, since the Yagán, in spite of living in a very cold climate just a stone’s throw from Antarctica, went mostly naked because apparently they are HARDCORE.)
The Open Language Archives offer a variety of resources regarding the language: http://www.language-archives.org/language/yag
A creation myth from the Yagán people: https://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/man-who-became-rainbow
SOURCES
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