Editing Guanche language (section)

==History==
The name ''Guanche'' originally referred to a "man from [[Tenerife]]",<ref name=Britannica>{{Cite EB1911|wstitle= Guanches |volume= 12 | pages = 650–651, line two |quote= ....man of Teneriffe,” corrupted, according to Nuñez de la Peña, by Spaniards into Guanchos}}</ref> and only later did it come to refer to all native inhabitants of the [[Canary Islands]]. Different dialects of the [[language]] were spoken across the [[archipelago]]. Archaeological finds on the Canaries include both [[Tifinagh|Libyco-Berber]] and [[Punic language|Punic]] inscriptions in [[petroglyphs|rock carvings]], although early accounts stated the Guanches themselves did not possess a system of writing.

The first reliable account of the Guanche language was provided by the Genovese explorer [[Nicoloso da Recco]] in 1341, with a list of the numbers 1–19, possibly from [[Fuerteventura]]. Recco's account reveals a [[Base 10|base-10]] counting system with strong similarities to [[Berber language|Berber]] [[numbers]].

[[Silbo Gomero language|Silbo]], originally a whistled form of Guanche speech used for communicating over long distances, was used on [[La Gomera]], [[El Hierro]], [[Tenerife]], and [[Gran Canaria]]. As the Guanche language became extinct, a [[Spanish language|Spanish]] version of Silbo was adopted by some inhabitants of the [[Canary Islands]].