John Bartlett reports for NPR about another attempt to revive a language on the verge of extinction, this one in Chile:
Ckunsa, the language of the Lickanantay people who have lived in the Atacama Desert for more than 11,000 years, was declared “extinct” in the 1950s. But it is still very much alive in the depths of the desert.
“I don’t accept that my native language is extinct,” spits 50–year-old Tomás Vilca under the patchy shade of an awning.[…]
However, Chile is multilingual. Alongside Spanish, Aymara and Quechua are spoken in the north of the country and up into Peru, Bolivia and northern Argentina. Down in picturesque Patagonia, there are a handful of Kawésqar speakers; and Mapuzugun, the language of the Mapuche people, Chile’s largest Indigenous group, is spoken widely in the forests and valleys around the Bio Bío River. Out on Easter Island, which has been part of Chilean territory since 1888, Rapanui is spoken by the Indigenous population. […]
“At school they’d tell me I was speaking ‘Bolivian’ – that I wasn’t talking like a Chilean,” remembers Vilca. “They stamped Ckunsa out of us from an early age. After that, my parents started to teach me Spanish so I didn’t suffer any more discrimination.”
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