Tales of a lost language. Kakan in the archive of science and the present day

Abstract

This article collects part of the “official” archive on the Kakán language. In this sense, we will try to account for what some language scholars have written, focusing on the idea of ​​“language death”, revised in recent years by the specific literature. To begin, we make a brief introduction about the way in which the science archive focused on the study of a lost language (§ I). Later, we inquire about the productions of some scholars in this key. At first, we focus more extensively on Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo (1835-1920), especially on Tesoro de Catamarqueñismos (1898), going through the missionary sources that he analyzes, and others that we incorporate for a panning of the treatment of the language in colonial documentation (§ II.i and II.ii). Then, we review some articles published between the 20th and 21st centuries (§ II.iii). Finally, we reflect on the representations of the Kakán as a dead language and the current stories about its persistence, based on the reading of some productions such as the school material “Somos los niños de esta tierra” (2012), the Tiri Kakán (2020) and the process being carried out by the Red Transandina Mujeres Diaguitas “Ancestras del Futuro” (§ III).