Chono is an extinct language of the Southern Cone that was formerly spoken along the southern part of the Chiloé Archipelago and as far south as the Taitao Peninsula in present-day southern Chile.

Documentation of the language is extremely limited, consisting of only a handful of attestations and brief references dating from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century (Viegas Barros 2005: 45). The most substantial source is a short catechism preserved without translation (Bausani 1975; also reproduced in Viegas Barros 2005: 89–90), complemented by a small number of place names (cf. Ibar Bruce 1960).

On the basis of this sparse material, Viegas Barros (2005: 99f) proposes that Chono may be genealogically related to the Alacalufan languages and to Yahgan. 

A tentative reconstruction of Chono phonology, presented by Adelaar and Muysken (2004: 565), is reproduced in Tables 1 and 2. Their analysis relies primarily on the linguistic evidence contained in the catechism (Bausani 1975; see also Viegas Barros 2005: 93–98).

Table 1. Tentative reconstruction of consonants in Chono (Adelaar & Muysken 2004, 565)

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Voiceless stops	p		t	č	k
Voiced stops	b				g
Fricative	f	z (?)	s		x	h
Nasal	m		n	nʸ	ŋ
Lateral			l	lʸ
Glide	w			y

Table 2. Tentative reconstruction of vowels in Chono (Adelaar & Muysken 2004, 565)

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
		a
Diphthongs: aw, ew, ow, ay, yu, wa, we, wi

References

• Adelaar, Willem & Peter Muysken. (2004). The languages of the Andes. Cambridge University Press.
• Bausani, Alessandro. (1975). Nuovi materiali sulla lingua Chono. In: Cerulli and Della Ragione (1975), pp. 107–16.
• Ibar Bruce, Jorge (1960). Ensayo sobre los indios Chonos e interpretación de sus toponimiías. Anales de la Universidad de Chile. 117: 61–70.
• Viegas Barros, Pedro. (2005). Voces en el viento. Raíces lingüísticas de la Patagonia. Buenos Aires: Mondragón.