Beingindigenous | Magazine

The Languages of Tierra del Fuego
(Extract from article " What Does Yaghan Have to Do with Digital Technology?" published in Linguistic Discovery, Volume 1, Issue 1 (2002). Dartmouth College)

It is the story of two languages that are extinct, or very close to it. Despite over a century of interest in the languages, we do not know enough about them to classify them.
What we do know about them is thanks to some fairly extraordinary efforts on the
part of a missionary, a priest, an ethnographer and an explorer. But the technology of their times has left relatively little for us now, putting the possibilities of the digital age for us in relief.

Martin Gusinde was a priest of the Catholic Order of the Divine Word. In 1918 he set off for his first mission to Tierra del Fuego. At the time he arrived, he found a total of approximately 80 Halakwulup and a depressingly small number of Ona/Selk™nam, living in two communities.
The lack of linguistic data in Gusinde™s own publications is remarkable, considering that Gusinde himself was fairly knowledgeable in all Fuegian languages.
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Klakowski™s research into his archives suggests that Gusinde had intended to publish at least two separate linguistic studies on the grammar of Ona and on Alakuluf/Halakwulup, plans which he abandoned around 1930. In contrast to Gusinde™s archival materials, as described by Klakowski (1998), Furlong™s collection seems rather haphazard.

Charles W. Furlong arrived on Tierra del Fuego at a time when the Ona and Yaghan communities were still fully vital, as a member of an explorer™s club, whose goal was basic discovery of new lands and peoples. Yet Furlong™s interest in Tierra del Fuego was more than passing, and he did collect materials with every intention of bringing his discoveries to public attention through publications. There was an self-professed urgency to his work as he recognized the imminent danger to the vitality of the people and languages of Tierra del Fuego; his 1917 article ends with a plea to the ihmagnanimityl. of the governments of Chile and Argentina to intervene in the situation which was causing the erosion of Ona land and culture, asserting that isthus could Christianity, spiced with justice and common sense, be meted out to a splendid aboriginal tribeli (1917:444).
Recognizing the importance of his contact with these people, Furlong generated copious fieldnotes and a number of sound recordings and during his stay on Tierra del Fuego. Crucially, he had access to native speaker communities, where Yaghan and Ona were the community languages, spoken as a first language by a primarily monolingual population. From this standpoint, Furlong™s work should be invaluable, particularly since oral recordings of these languages in a vital stage are now impossible to create: the few known speakers of Yaghan no longer constitute a speech community, but live separately from one another in a Spanish-speaking environment, and Ona is no longer spoken at all.
The Furlong sound archives total several hours of audio recordings, consisting primarily of songs, some forest calls, and a few snippets of speech. Of the latter, one of the most audible is a translation of the Lord™s Prayer into Yaghan, unfortunately read by a non-native speaker (Bridges, presumably), with intonation that is remarkably reminiscent of Church Latin. The remaining speech recordings are short, nearly inaudible, and have not been transcribed.

Source: Extract from the interesting article " What Does Digital Technology Have to Do with Yaghan?" published in in Linguistic Discovery, Volume 1, Issue 1; by Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley : http://journals.dartmouth.edu/webobjbin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/1/xmlpage/1/archive