The last native speaker dies, the Yamana language officially disappears

An indigenous language from the southernmost region of South America that disappeared completely after the death of the last native speaker.

Ms. Cristina Calderon is the last Yamana-speaking person of the Yagan community.

On Wednesday (February 16), Ms. Cristina Calderon passed away at the age of 93. Her main language is Yamana of the Yagan community. After her sister's death in 2003, Calderon was the last person in the world who could speak the language. She tried to preserve her knowledge by compiling a dictionary in Yamana with translations into Spanish.

Calderon's daughter Lidia Gonzalez said on Twitter: "After my mother passed away, an important part of our people's cultural memory was gone." Gonzalez is one of the representatives currently drafting a new constitution in Chile.

However, Gonzalez also thinks that the dictionary compiled by her mother will partly preserve the Yamana language. She said: "Although when my mother passed away, a lot of especially valuable knowledge was lost linguistically, in reality we still have the ability to salvage and systematize the Yamana language." . 

Although there are still a few dozen Yagan people worldwide, over the generations, people in the community have stopped learning the language.

Calderon lived in a simple house and made a living selling knitted socks in the Chilean town of Villa Ukika, a town founded by the Yagans on the outskirts of Puerto Williams.

The ancestors of this community once inhabited the southernmost islands of South America, now Chile and Argentina, near the frozen Antarctic.