Kawesqar

Kawesqar, also called Alacaluf, is the language of the Kawesqar, a canoe-nomad people of the fjords and channels of western Patagonia, formerly heard from the Gulf of Penas to the waters south of the Strait of Magellan. It is the chief surviving member of the small Alacalufan family, whose northern and southern varieties were known as Aksana and Hekaine.

The language had no writing of its own, and its first recorded vocabulary was compiled in 1698 by the French adventurer Jean de la Guilbaudiere.

From the seventeenth century Jesuits based on Chiloe sailed into the channels to gather the canoe peoples into their missions. In the 1760s a grammar of the speech of the Calen and Taijataf groups was being written at the Cailin mission, only to be lost when the missionary carrying it drowned in the Patagonian channels.