Uncommon · Knowledge
Xincan languages
Language
Xinca (or Xinka, Sinca, or Szinca) is a small extinct family of Mesoamerican languages; formerly, the language was regarded as a single language isolate. Xinca was once spoken by the Indigenous Xinca people in southeastern Guatemala, parts of El Salvador, and Honduras.
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They have also historically been referred to as Popoluca or Popoluca-Xinca; Popoluca being a Nahuatl term for unintelligible speech. The Xincan languages have no demonstrated affiliations with other language families. Lehmann (1920) tried linking Xincan with Lencan, but the proposal was never demonstrated. An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) also found lexical similarities between Xincan and Lencan. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance. The Xincan languages were formerly regarded as one language isolate. However, the most recent studies suggest they were indeed a language family.
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