Selkünam, also known by the exonym Ona, is a language formerly spoken by the Selkünam people in Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego in southernmost South America.
One of the Chonan languages of Patagonia, Selkünam is now extinct, due to the late 19th-century Selkünam genocide by European immigrants, high fatalities due to disease, and disruption of traditional society. One source states that the last fluent native speakers died in the 1980s. Radboud University linguist Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia worked with two individuals to write a reference grammar of the language, namely, Herminia Vera-Ona (died 2014), a semi-speaker who spoke Ona until the age of 8, and , a young man who started learning the language after learning he was part-Selkünam at the age of 8. At the time the grammar was written, the latter was believed to be the only living individual fluent in Selkünam, albeit not natively.
Within the Southern Chon language family, Selkünam 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.
The Selkünam 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 Selkünam, ÃÂngela 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. Currently, Selkünam communities are revitalizing the language. A man of mixed Selkünam and Mapuche ancestry, Joubert Yanten Gomez (Indigenous name: Keyuk), has successfully taught himself the language.
Based on available data, Selkünam seems to have had 3 vowels and 23 consonants.
Selkünam's three vowels were .
There was also a simple tone system, which Najlis (1973) analyzed as high and low tone, and Martini (1982) analyzed as pitch accent.
The Ona language is an objectâÂÂverbâÂÂsubject 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 Selkünam: nouns and verbs.
The Selkünam 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 Selkünam, ; from the Spanish word , which translates to .
The following is a list of examples of comparative vocabulary from Chonan languages: Selkünam, Haush and Tehuelche; and also vocabulary from the unrelated Yahgan (Yámana).