Key facts
- Native to
- Spain
- Region
- Canary Islands
- Ethnicity
- Guanches
- Extinct
- 17th century
- Language family
- Afroasiatic ? Berber ? Guanche
- Iso 639 3
- gnc
- Glottolog
- guan1277
via Wikipedia infobox
~5 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Guanche is an extinct language or dialect continuum that was spoken by the Guanches of the Canary Islands until the 16th or 17th century. It died out after the conquest of the Canary Islands as the Guanche ethnic group was assimilated into the dominant Spanish culture. The Guanche language is known today through sentences and individual words that were recorded by early geographers, as well as through several place-names and some Guanche words that were retained in the Canary Islanders' Spanish.
Classification
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Guanche” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.