Lencan
Geographic distribution	El Salvador andHonduras
Ethnicity	Lenca people
Linguistic classification	Macro-Chibchan ? Lencan
Subdivisions	Honduran Lencan † Salvadoran Lencan
Language codes
ISO 639-3	len
Glottolog	lenc1239
Map of El Salvador's Indigenous Peoples at the time of theSpanish conquest:1.Pipil people, 2.Lenca people, 3.Kakawira o Cacaopera, 4.Xinca, 5.MayaCh'orti' people, 6.MayaPoqomam people, 7.Mangue o Chorotega.
Lenca is Extinct according to the classification system of theUNESCOAtlas of the World's Languages in Danger [1]

TheLencan languages are a small linguistic family fromCentral America, whose speakers before the Spanish conquest spread throughoutEl Salvador andHonduras. But by the beginning of the 20th century, only two languages of the family survived,Salvadoran Lenca or Potón andHonduran Lenca, which were described and studied academically; Of them, only Salvadoran Lenca still has current speakers, despite the fact that indigenous people belonging to the Lenca ethnic group exceed between 37,000 and 100,000 people.^[2][3][4]

There are two attested Lencan languages:

• Salvadoran Lencan was spoken inChilanga andGuatajigua.^[2] Lencans had arrived in El Salvador about 2,295 years B.P. and founded the site ofQuelepa. One speaker remains.^[2][5]

• Honduran Lencan was spoken with minor dialect differences inIntibucá,Opatoro,Guajiquiro,Similatón (modernCabañas), andSanta 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 (includingejectives) and 5 vowels.

The external relationships of the Lencan languages are disputed. Inclusion withinMacro-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.)."^[6][7]

Another proposal by Lehmann (1920:727) links Lencan with theXincan 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)^[8] also found lexical similarities between Lencan andXincan. 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 wasGuajiquiro. In 1982 a Honduran Lenca speaker was found in Guajiquiro.^{[9][10][11][12]} In the 1970s, died inChilanga, Anselmo Hernández, the last competent Salvadoran Lenca speaker. In the 1990s, somesemi-speakers of Honduran Lenca were found. It was assumed that the languages were most likely extinct, and it was believed that it was very unlikely that there were any elders with any knowledge or memory of both languages, and it was also believed that it was very unlikely that fluent speakers could be found. The Honduran Lenca is currently believed to be extinct.^[10][11]

In the case ofSalvadoran Lenca, in the end of the ninetiesConsuelo Roque,linguist from theUniversity of El Salvador (UES), foundMario Salvador Hernández fromGuatajiagua (a semi-speaker who is considered the last native speaker by the salvadoran newspapers, and specifically of the variant of that population, and who learned the language from his grandmother) and both would write a learning primer titled in spanish:Poton piau, nuestra lengua Potón.^[13] However, linguist Alan R. King, in his 2016 book titled in spanishConozcamos 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...".^[14]

While in the case ofHonduran Lenca, thelinguistAmericanAlan R. King, in the company of his colleagueJames Morrow, in 2017 they published the bookKotik molka niwamal (meaningLet's learn to speak Lenca), 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 forSalvadoran Lenca to prevent its extinction.^[15]

A 2002 novel byRoberto Castillo,La guerra mortal de los sentidos, chronicles the adventures of the "Searcher for the Lenca Language."^[16]

Proto-Lenca reconstructions by Arguedas (1988):^[17]

• Campbell, Lyle. 1997.American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Campbell, Lyle. 2012.The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide. De Gruyter Mouton: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston.
• Constenla Umaña, Adolfo. (1981). Comparative Chibchan Phonology. (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia).
• Constenla Umaña, Adolfo. (1991).Las lenguas del Área Intermedia: Introducción a su estudio areal. Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, San José.
• Constenla Umaña, Adolfo. (1995). Sobre el estudio diacrónico de las lenguas chibchenses y su contribución al conocimiento del pasado de sus hablantes.Boletín del Museo del Oro 38-39: 13-56.
• Constenla Umaña, Adolfo (2005). "Existe relacion genealogica entre las lenguas misumalpas y las chibchenses?"Estudios de Linguistica Chibcha.23: 9–59.
• Fabre, Alain. 2005.Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: LENCA.[1]
• Hemp, Eric. 1976. "On Earlier Lenca Vowels".International Journal of American Linguistics 42(1): 78-79.
• Lehman, Walter. 1920.Zentral-Amerika. see pp. 700–719 (Salvadoran Lenca) and pp. 668–692 (Honduran Lenca).

Wiktionary has a list of reconstructed forms atAppendix:Proto-Lencan reconstructions

• OLAC resources in and about the Lenca language
• Audio Recording of an Elicitation and Wordlist in Lenca from theMesoAmerican Languages Collection of Lyle Campbell at theArchive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.

• Mesoamerican languages
• Lencan languages
• Lenca
• Macro-Chibchan languages
• Language families
• Indigenous languages of Central America
• Languages of El Salvador
• Languages of Honduras
• Extinct languages of North America

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