Comechingón (plural Comechingones ) is the common name for a group of people indigenous to the Argentine provinces of Córdoba and San Luis . By the end of the 17th century, most Comechingones had been killed or displaced by the Spanish conquistadores .
6-507: The two main Comechingón groups called themselves Henia (in the north) and Kamiare (in the south), each subdivided into a dozen or so tribes. The name comechingón is a deformation of the pejorative term kamichingan —"cave dwellers"—used by the Sanavirón tribe. They were sedentary, practiced agriculture yet gathered wild fruits, and raised animals for wool, meat and eggs. Their culture
12-571: A rich pictography and abstract petroglyphs. A cultural contribution is the vowel extension in the Spanish of the present inhabitants of Córdoba, but also not uncommon in San Luis and other neighbouring provinces. According to the 2010 census there are 34,546 self-identified Comechingón descendants in Argentina. Sanavir%C3%B3n This is a list of indigenous languages that are or were spoken in
18-461: The Guaraní language is official, together with Spanish, in the northeastern Corrientes Province . [+] Dubious. Fabre states (with convincing arguments) that no Kaiwá live in Argentina. [*] Some authors give this languages as extinct. (?) Tentative classification A large number of languages once spoken in Argentina have disappeared. According to Censabella (1999), two thirds of the languages spoken when
24-451: The Spaniards arrived became extinct. In some cases, the languages disappeared along with the ethnic groups that spoke them; in other, the acculturation and transculturation phenomena associated with deep changes in the living conditions of the indigenous peoples caused the extinction, even if a number of individuals of the ethnical group still survive. Other extinct languages are known just by
30-580: The present territory of Argentina . Although the official language of Argentina is Spanish , several Indigenous languages are in use. Most are spoken only within their respective indigenous communities, some with very few remaining speakers. Others, especially Aymara , Quechua ( South Bolivian Quechua and Santiago del Estero Quichua ), Toba (Qom) and Guaraní ( Western Argentine Guaraní , Paraguayan Guaraní , Mbyá Guaraní ), are alive and in common use in specific regions. Finally, some such as Abipón and Yaghan , are now completely extinct. Since 2004
36-620: Was heavily influenced by that of the Andes . Several aspects seem to differentiate the Henia-Kamiare from the rest of amerindians. They had a rather Caucasian appearance, with beards and quite a few of them with greenish eyes. Another distinctive aspect was their communal stone houses, half buried in the ground to endure the cold, wind and snow of the winter. Their language was lost when Spanish policies favoured Quechua , an indigenous language they transplanted from Upper Peru . Nevertheless, they left
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