Kunza

Kunza, known to its own speakers as Likanantai, is the extinct language isolate of the Atacama people, once spoken across the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Peru, including the Chilean villages of Peine, Socaire and Caspana, with speakers also reported in Bolivia. The last fully competent speakers were documented by anthropologists in 1953, and the language is considered to have gone extinct after 1964, though a revitalization movement among the roughly 2,000-strong Atacameno people began in the 2020s. Kunza shows no confirmed relationship to any other language family, and while it is believed to have had polysynthetic features, the surviving documentation is too limited to settle its internal structure or any wider genetic connection.