Selkʼnam language

Selkʼnam, also known by the exonym Ona, is a language formerly spoken by the Selkʼnam people in Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego in southernmost South America.

One of the Chonan languages of Patagonia, Selkʼnam is now extinct, due to the late 19th-century Selkʼnam genocide by European immigrants, high fatalities due to disease, and disruption of traditional society. One source states that the last fluent native speakers died in the 1980s. Radboud University linguist Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia worked with two individuals to write a reference grammar of the language, namely, Herminia Vera-Ona (died 2014), a semi-speaker who spoke Ona until the age of 8, and Joubert "Keyuk" Yanten, a young man who started learning the language after learning he was part-Selkʼnam at the age of 8. At the time the grammar was written, the latter was believed to be the only living individual fluent in Selkʼnam, albeit not natively.