Het is the term used by Thomas Falkner, an English Jesuit, at the end of the 18th century for various nomadic groups from the Argentine Pampas [es] and Patagonia, including the so-called indigenous Pampas [es] and northern Tehuelches, but excluding the Mapuche (speakers of Mapudungun).

Falkner subdivided the Het into the Chechehet, the Diuihet or Didiuhet, and the Taluhet. The easternmost Didiuhet, near modern Buenos Aires and influenced by the Guarani, were called the Querandí.^[1] It is not clear if these peoples were related linguistically or only culturally.

The Het were neighbored on the north by the Chaná, on the northwest and west by the Mapuche, and on the south by the Puelche.

Faulkner in the middle-to-late 1700s had listed few ethnic groups in the northeastern pampas region that were not Araucanian:^[2]

• The Taluhet occupied the modern provinces of San Luis in the east, Córdoba, and Santa Fe in the west.
• The Diuihet (Divihet, Didiuhet, Diliuhet) inhabited the coastal region between the La Plata and Paraná rivers in Buenos Aires Province, southern Santa Fe, and inland through La Pampa and as far as Mendoza.
• The Chechehet lived as far south as the mouths of the Colorado and Río Negro rivers in southern Buenos Aires Province.
• The Tehuelhet (now Tehuelche people).

Didiuhet
Querandi
Native to	Argentina
Region	Patagonian pampas
Ethnicity	Querandí etc.
Extinct	19th century
Language family	Unclassified (Chonan?)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	quer1237  Querandi
Approximate distribution of the Het, Puelche, and Chon peoples prior to their genocide

In 1922, Robert Lehmann-Nitsche noted the common "het" in the demonyms and proposed the "Het" language family with multiple members, although later reduced the family himself to just one language, Chechehet. Thsi idea was later picked up by Loukotka and Mason, but strongly opposed by Antonio Tovar and José Pedro Viegas-Barros [es]. Modern researchers consider the Chechehet language to be another name for Gününa Küne.^{[2] [3]}

Viegas-Barros, based on the work of Rodolfo Casamiquela, states that the Het languages are in fact "ghost languages" that never existed, the language name arising from problems of interpretation.^[4]

The supposed linguistic similarities between languages of different tribes, grouped by Falkner together as "Hets", are highly disputable.^{[citation needed]} In particular, only two sentences and a few words recorded by French sailors around 1555 are known from the Querandí language. This evidence is too scarce to be able to conclusively identify a relationship, although on the basis of this little data, Viegas-Barros shows that the language of the Querandíes could have been related to the Gününa Küne.^[4]

Glottolog combines linguistic materials for Chechehet with Puelche.^[5]

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Chechehet and Querandí;^[6] Taluhet is unattested.

gloss	Chechehet	Querandí (Didiuhet)
two	chivil
moon		zobá
earth	chu
bow		afia
great	hati

Campbell (2024) declares Loukotka's findings as stemming form a confusion with a long history".^[2]

• Campbell, L. (2024). "Phantom, False, and Spurious Languages of South America". The Indigenous Languages of the Americas: History and Classification. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-767346-1. Retrieved 2025-03-01.