The two Chon languages are Selk'nan which died out two years ago and Tehuelche. Selk'nam - these unique people lived in Tierra del Fuego and were widely studied and extensively photographed throughout the 20th century. I bought several postcards of them in Chile (santiago) but no one bothered to save their language.
The remaining Chon language is also near extinction - Tehuelche. These were the tall nomads of S Patagonia. They traded peacefully with the Welsh settlers but were persecuted by the Argentine authorities and their land taken away. Out of some 5000 in 1900 there are about 20 speakers left. Racially they have been absorbed by the incomers, and there are many more Bolivian Indians in Patagonia than natives now.
The northern Tehuelche were conquered by the Mapuche in Victorian times, and absorbed by them. The Mapuche are still with us and fighting for their rights in Chile and Argentina. (some 200 000 Mapuche)
Some Tehuelche learnt Welsh and left thier children with the Welsh to learn the language and get education, once again their is a solid photographic record of this people. Maybe someone will yet record and save the Tehuelche culture - who knows??? Maybe you?
A language family is a group of genetically related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language.
The concept of linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than the concept of biological ancestry, as in cases of extreme historical language contact, in particular the formation of creole languages and other types of mixed languages; it may be unclear which language should be considered the ancestor of a given language.
Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family, because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram.
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