Lencan languages

There are two attested Lencan languages:

• Salvadoran Lencan was spoken in Chilanga and Guatajigua. Lencans had arrived in El Salvador about 2,295 years B.P. and founded the site of Quelepa. One speaker remains.
• Honduran Lencan was spoken with minor dialect differences in Intibucá, Opatoro, Guajiquiro, Similatón (modern Cabañas), and Santa Elena. Some phrases survive; it is not known if the entire language still exists.

The languages are not closely related; Swadesh (1967) estimated 3,000 years since separation. Arguedas Cortés (1987) reconstructs Proto-Lencan with 12 consonants (including ejective) and 5 vowels.

The external relationships of the Lencan languages are disputed. Inclusion within Macro-Chibchan has often been proposed; Campbell (1987) reported that he found no solid evidence for such a connection, but Constenla-Umaña (2005) proposed regular correspondence between Lencan, Misumalpan, and Chibchan.

Campbell (2012) acknowledges that these claims of connection between Lencan, Misumalpan, and Chibchan have not yet been proved systematically, but he notes that Constenla-Umaña (2005) "presented evidence to support a relationship with two neighboring families [of languages]: Misumalpan and Lencan, which constitute the Lenmichí Micro-Phylum. According to Constenla-Umaña's study (2005), the Lenmichi Micro-Phylum first split into Proto-Chibchan and Proto-Misulencan, the common intermediate ancestor of the Lencan and the Misumalpan languages. This would have happened around 9,726 years before the present or 7,720 B.C. (the average of the time depths between the Chibchan languages and the Misulencan languages)...The respective subancestors of the Lencan and the Misumalpan languages would have separated around 7,705 before the present (5,069 B.C.), and Paya and the other intermediate ancestors of all the other Chibchan languages would have separated around 6,682 (4,676 B.C.)."

Another proposal by Lehmann (1920:727) links Lencan with the Xincan language family, though Campbell (1997:167) rejects most of Lehmann's twelve lexical comparisons as invalid. An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) also found lexical similarities between Lencan and Xincan. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.

The Proto-Lencan homeland was most likely in central Honduras (Campbell 1997:167).

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the use of Honduran Lenca and Salvadoran Lenca began to decline. In the 1950s, Honduran Lenca was already in a critical state of extinction, since the only place where there were speakers was Guajiquiro. In 1982 a Honduran Lenca speaker was found in Guajiquiro. In the 1970s, died in Chilanga, Anselmo Hernández, the last competent Salvadoran Lenca speaker. In the 1990s, some semi-speakers of Honduran Lenca were found. It was assumed that the languages were extinct, no elders had any knowledge or memory of either language, and there were no fluent speakers. Honduran Lenca is currently believed to be extinct.

In the case of Salvadoran Lenca, at the end of the nineties Consuelo Roque, linguist from the University of El Salvador (UES), found Mario Salvador Hernández from Guatajiagua (a semi-speaker who is considered the last native speaker by the Salvadoran newspapers, specifically of the variant of that town, and who learned the language from his grandmother) and both would write a learning primer 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 (translated into English): "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...".

While in the case of Honduran Lenca, the American linguist Alan R. King and his colleague James Morrow published the book Kotik molka niwamal (meaning Let's learn to speak Lenca) in 2017, which is a compilation of words in Lenca among the communities still existing that opens the possibility of recovering a significant part of the language. Currently in El Salvador there are rehabilitation projects for Salvadoran Lenca to prevent its extinction.

A 2002 novel by Roberto Castillo, La guerra mortal de los sentidos, chronicles the adventures of the "Searcher for the Lenca Language."

Proto-Lenca reconstructions by Arguedas (1988), along with forms in daughter languages from Campbell (1999):