Salvadoran Lenca

Salvadoran Lenca, Chilanga or Potón is a Lencan language spoken in El Salvador, of which two dialects have been described: that of Chilanga (extinct), and that of Guatajiagua. Other dialects may have existed in the past in the other towns where the Lencas lived in present-day El Salvador.

Salvadoran Lenca belongs to the small Lencan language family, which also includes Honduran Lenca. There have been attempts to link the Lencan languages to other language families, but none have been successful. According to Adolfo Costenla Umaña, Salvadoran Lenca and Honduran Lenca separated 2,295 years ago; approximately the same time at which the archaeological site of Quelepa was founded.

History

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the use of Salvadoran Lenca began to decline; in the 1970s, a speaker was found in Chilanga. At the end of the nineties, Consuelo Roque, a linguist at the University of El Salvador (UES), found Mario Salvador Hernández, a semi-speaker from Guatajiagua who had learned the language from his grandmother, and the two would together write an instructional book titled Poton piau, nuestra lengua Potón.

However, linguist Alan R. King, in his 2016 book titled Conozcamos el Lenca, una lengua de El Salvador (where he also used the Potón Piau primer as a reference), points out that: "Today no one knows how to speak Lenca, although certain individuals have memories of—or have learned—some fragments of that now lost language. This type of partial knowledge is not even remotely close, in any case that we have been able to verify, to a real mastery of the historical language, whose disappearance dates back to the mid-twentieth century...".

Research in 2004 by the University of El Salvador recorded 380 words, a phonological inventory of five vowels and 16 consonants, alternation between “g” and “k”, and reduplication to create plurals from singular forms.