Chono

Chono is an extinct language isolate formerly spoken by the Chono people of the Chonos and Chiloe archipelagos off the coast of southern Chile, with its last speakers disappearing around 1875. It is poorly attested, known mainly from an eighteenth-century catechism, and its classification has proven confusing: Pedro Viegas Barros proposed a relationship to the Kaweskar and Yahgan languages on the basis that roughly 45 percent of recorded Chono vocabulary and grammatical forms correspond to one or the other while remaining distinct from both, and Glottolog notes lexical parallels with Mapuche as well as Kaweskar but treats Chono as an isolate because its core vocabulary remains clearly unrelated to either. A proposed related language called Wayteka has been dismissed by Lyle Campbell as spurious, its source material likely a mix of genuine and invented vocabulary.