Zenu

Zenu, also called Sinú or Sinúfana, was the language of the Zenú chiefdoms of the Caribbean lowlands of northern South America, spoken in the Sinú and San Jorge river valleys. It is poorly documented and has no surviving written texts.

Before the Spanish conquest it was the dominant tongue of Zenú territory, whose farming towns used canals and raised terraces to manage the annual floods, and whose goldsmiths placed finely worked gold in graves. That funeral gold drew the conquistadors: between 1510 and 1535 the chiefdoms were broken by warfare and epidemic disease, and their tombs were systematically looted.

In 1773 the Spanish crown set aside the reserve of San Andrés de Sotavento for the Zenú, but the language continued to lose ground to Spanish, ceasing to be a living tongue around the opening of the nineteenth century.