Salvadoran Lenca



Salvadoran Lenca or Potón is a language of the linguistic family of the Lenca languages spoken in El Salvador; and 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.

According to Adolfo Costenla Umaña, the Salvadoran Lenca and the Honduran Lenca would have separated 2,295 years ago; time in which the archaeological site of Quelepa would have been founded.

Salvadoran Lenca is of the small language family of Lencan languages that consists of two languages one of which is the Salvadoran Lenca and the Honduran Lenca. There have been attempts to link the Lencan languages to other languages within their groupings, but there has been no success.

According to Salvadoran newspapers, only one native speaker remains in Guatajiagua, department of Morazán, named Mario Salvador Hernández; who learned the language from his grandmother, and who together with Consuelo Roque would write a learning booklet entitled: Poton piau, nuestro idioma Potón in conjunction with the Lenca Communal Association of Guatajiagua, and published in 1999; in total, said document would compile 380 words. However, linguist Alan R. King, in his 2016 book titled in spanish Conozcamos el Lenca, una lengua de El Salvador (where he also used the Potón Piau primer as a reference), points out that (translating in 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...".

Currently in El Salvador there are rehabilitation projects for the Salvadoran Lenca to prevent its extinction.

Consonants

 * Obstruents can be voiced allophonically.

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, in Chilanga, a Salvadoran Lenca speaker was found. In the end of the nineties, Consuelo Roque, a linguist at the University of El Salvador (UES), found Mario Salvador Hernández from Guatajiagua, a semi-speaker who learned the language from his grandmother, and both would write a learning book titled in spanish: Poton piau, nuestra lengua Potón; research in 2004 by the University of El Salvador recorded 380 words, five vowels and 16 consonants, alternation between “g” and “k”, with reduplication to create plurals from singular forms. Currently in El Salvador there are rehabilitation projects for the Salvadoran Lenca to prevent its extinction.