greeting your relatives
Basic Facts:
Yagán, also known as Yámana and Háusi Kúta, is a language isolate. It used to be spoken by the Yagan people on the Tierra de Fuego archipelago in Argentina and Chile. It currently has only one native speaker remaining, who is 90 years old and lives on Navarino Island in Chile.
Writing System:
Yagán is written using a modified Latin alphabet, using the letters and digraphs a, æ, ch, e, ö, f, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, rh, s, š, t, u, w, and x.
How does it sound?
Yagán has 7 vowels and 17 consonants. It includes the glottal stop and four separate approximants (alveolar, post-alveolar, palatal, and velar). You can hear it spoken in this video - it starts being spoken at around 1:25, but the entire video is really interesting so I suggest you watch the whole thing :)
Grammatical features:
Yagán has an extensive case system for nouns, and voice and aspect systems in verbs. Because of this, word order is relatively free. Pronouns are divided into three ‘persons’ that are different from the usual 1st, 2nd, and 3rd - Yagán has the proximal (in practice, this almost always corresponds to 1st person in English), the near distal, and the further distal. It exhibits verb serialization. Reduplication is not a productive process except in adverbs.
Resources to learn more:
https://www.ethnologue.com/18/language/yag/
https://ids.clld.org/contributions/315
http://web.uchile.cl/archivos/uchile/cultura/lenguas/yaganes/ (in Spanish)
https://books.google.com/books?id=4V1IAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false (in French)
