Chono

Chono was the language of the nomadic canoe people of the Chiloé, Guaitecas and Chonos archipelagos in southern Chile, hunter-gatherers who were the first identifiable inhabitants of those islands and left many shell middens.

Francisco de Ulloa's expedition met them in 1553, and after a royal decree of 1608 the Spanish of Chiloé turned their southern voyages into slave raids. Jesuits reaching Chiloé in 1609 compiled a grammar and vocabulary, now lost, and missionized groups settled on Guar Island from 1710.

The only surviving text is an eighteenth-century catechism, from which only about twenty words are known with certainty. Chono's classification is unresolved, with parallels to Kawésqar but an unrelated core. After the Spanish depopulation of the archipelagos in the 1740s the Chono merged into the Huilliche and mestizo population, the language disappearing by the early nineteenth century.