Mapuche language

Mapudungun (mapu means 'earth' and dungun means 'to speak') (also Mapudungu, Araucano, Araukano, Mapuche, Araucanian) is a language isolate spoken in central Chile and west central Argentina by the Mapuche (mapu is 'earth' and che means 'people') people.

It is also known as Mapudungu, Araucano (the name given to the Mapuche people by the Spanish, it sometimes has a negative connotation) and Mapuche. Its speakers number 440,000, with 400,000 in the Central Valley of Chile and 40,000 in the Argentinian region of Patagonia. Some 200,000 people use the language regularly.

Mapadungun lacks substantive protection or promotion, despite the Chilean government's commitment to improve the situation and provide full access to education in Mapuche areas in southern Chile.

History

The Araucanian language, also known as Mapudungun, has been classified by some authorities as being related to the Penutian languages of North America. Others group it among the Andean languages (Greenberg 1987, Key 1978), and yet others postulate an Araucanian-Mayan relationship (Stark 1970, Hamp 1971); Croese (1989, 1991) has advanced the hypothesis that it is related to Arawak. Other authorities regard it as an isolate language. It has had some lexical influence from Quechua and Spanish.

When the Spanish arrived in Chile, they found three groups of Mapuche, one of which were the Picunche (from pikum 'north' and che 'people') who were conquered quite rapidly. Since the 18th century the southern group or Huilliche (willi 'south' and che 'people') has lost its specific identity, but the central group, the Mapuche retains it.

The term Araucano is nowadays avoided by scholars and Mapuche alike.

Regional variation

Mapudungun has a number of dialects. In Argentina, the Pehuenche dialect is spoken in Neuquén (from Valdivia to Neuquén); the Moluche or Nguluche dialect is spoken from Limay to Lake Nahuel Huapi; the Huilliche or Veliche dialect is spoken in the Lake Nahuel Huapi region as well, and also in Valdivia, Chile; and the Ranquenche dialect is spoken in Chalileo, General Acha and in the Río Colorado region.

Two varieties of Mapudungu are still spoken. The most widely spoken is Mapudungun (also Araucano, Mapuche), the language of the Mapuche people. There are an estimated 275,000 active users of the language, 200,000 in Chile and 75,000 in Argentina.

Huillice (also Huilliche, Veliche) has several thousand speakers, most of whom speak Spanish as a first language, south of the Mapuche in Chile's Valdivian Coastal Range and on Chiloé Island.

Gordon (2005) treats these as separate languages.

Phonology

Main article: Mapudungun phonology

• Prosody: Unlike Spanish, Mapudungun has fairly predictable, non-contrastive stress. The stressed syllable is generally on the second last syllable in words that end in a vowel, and on the final syllable in words that end in a consonant. There are some exceptions, such as when the first person plural ends in the semivowel j, where the accent is placed on the final syllable. There is no phonemic tone.

• Vowels: Mapudungun has six vowel phonemes: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ and a high central unrounded vowel, /ɨ/. The last sound is spelled ü or v depending on the alphabet used, and is pronounced as a schwa /ə/ when unstressed.

• Consonants: Mapudungun does not distinguish between voiceless and voiced consonants plosives. There are three approximants (or glides). Liquids consist of the three lateral sounds and what is phonetically close to a retroflex approximant. Some authors do not recognize /s/ as a separate phoneme; rather, they class it as an allophone of /ʃ/. /tʴ/ (spelled as "tr", "tx" or even "x") is often described as a /ʧ/ sound followed by a /ɹ/ sound; it is similar to the sound of English tr in tree, but without aspiration.
  

	bilabial	labiodental	interdental	dento-alveolar	postalveolar	palatal	retroflex	velar
plosive	p		t̪	t				k
nasal	m		n̪	n		ɲ		ŋ
fricative		f	θ	s	ʃ
approximant	w					j		ɣ
affricate					ʧ		tʴ
liquid			l̪	l		ʎ	ɹ

• Spelling: The Mapuche are not believed to have had a writing system when the Spanish arrived. Historically, there have been a number of proposals for Mapudungun spelling, all of them using the Latin alphabet. The alphabet used in this article is the one used by Chilean linguists and other people in many publications in the language ("alfabeto mapuche unificado"). This alphabet consists of the following letters: a, ch, d (for /θ/), e, f, g (for /ɣ/), i, k, l, l (for /l̪/), ll (for /ʎ/), m, n, n (for /n̪/), ñ (for /ɲ/), ng (for /ŋ/), o, p, r, s(h), t, t (for /t̪/), tr (for /tʴ/), u, ü (for /ɨ/), w, and y.

Grammar

• Nouns in Mapudungun do not distinguish masculine from feminine gender like Spanish, French, and other Romance languages. Instead, it distinguishes animate nouns from inanimate ones -- this opposition is reflected in the use of pu as an plural indicator for nouns that denote animate objects and yuka as an equivalent plural for inanimate nouns. Chi (or ti) can be used as a definite animate article as in chi wentru 'the man' and chi pu wentru for 'the men'. The number kiñe 'one' serves as an indefinate article.

• The personal pronouns distinguish three persons and three numbers; they are as follows: iñche 'I', iñchiw 'we (2)', iñchiñ 'we (more than 2)'; eymi 'thou', eymu 'you (2)', eymün 'you (more than 2)'; fey 'he/she/it', feyengu 'they (2)', feyengün 'they (more than 2)'.

• Possessive pronouns are related to the personal forms: ñi 'my; his, her; their', yu 'our (2)', iñ 'our (more than 2)'; mi 'thy', mu 'your (2)', mün 'your (more than 2)'. They are often found with a particle ta that does not seem to add anything specific to the meaning, e.g. tami 'thy'.

• Interrogative pronouns include iney 'who', chem 'what', chumül 'when', chew 'where', chum(ngechi) 'how' and chumngelu 'why'.

• Numbers from 1 to 10 are as follows: 1 kiñe, 2 epu, 3 küla, 4 meli, 5 kechu, 6 kayu, 7 regle, 8 pura, 9 aylla, 10 mari; 20 epu mari, 30 küla mari, 110 (kiñe) pataka mari.

• Verbs can be finite or non-finite (non-finite endings: -n, -el, -etew, -lu, -am, etc.), are intransitive or transitive and are conjugated according to person (first, second and third), number (singular, dual and plural), voice (active, agentless passive and reflexive-reciprocal, plus two applicatives) and mood (indicative, imperative and subjunctive). In the indicative, the present (zero) and future (-(y)a) tenses are distinguished. There are a number of aspects: the progressive, resultative and habitual are well established; some forms that seem to mark some subtype of perfect are also found. Other verb morphology includes an evidential marker (reportative-mirative), directionals (cislocative, translocative, andative and ambulative, plus an interruptive and continuous action marker) and modal markers (sudden action, faked action, immediate action, etc.). There is productive noun incorporation, and the case can be made for root compounding morphology.

The indicative present paradigm for an intransitive verb like konün 'enter' is as follows:

		Number
		Singular	Dual	Plural
Person	First	kon-ün	kon-iyu	kon-iyiñ
	Second	kon-imi	kon-imu	kon-imün
	Third	kon-i	kon-ingu	kon-ingün

What some authors have described as an inverse system (similar to the ones described for Algonquian languages) can be seen from the forms of a transitive verb like pen 'see'. The 'intransitive' forms are the following:

		Number
		Singular	Dual	Plural
Person	First	pe-n	pe-yu	pe-iñ
	Second	pe-ymi	pe-ymu	pe-ymün
	Third	pe-y	pe-yngu	pe-yngün

The 'transitive' forms are the following (only singular forms are provided here):

		Agent
		First	Second	Third
Patient	First	(REFL)	pe-e-n	pe-e-new
	Second	pe-e-yu	(REFL)	pe-e-ymew
	Third	pe-fi-ñ	pe-fi-mi	pe-fi / pe-e-yew

When a third peson interacts with a first or second person, the forms are either direct (without -e) or inverse (with -e) and the speaker has no choice. When two third persons interact, two different forms are available: the direct form (pefi) is appropriate when the agent is topical (i.e., the central figure in that particular passage). The inverse form (peenew) is appropriate when the patient is topical. Thus, chi wentru pefi chi domo means 'the man saw the woman' while chi wentru peeyew chi domo means something like 'the man was seen by the woman'; note, however, that it is not a passive construction; the passive would be chi wentru pengey 'the man was seen; someone saw the man'.

Studies of Mapudungun

Older works
The formalization and normalization of Mapudungun was effected by the first Mapudungun grammar published by the Jesuit priest Luis de Valdivia in 1606 (Arte y Gramatica General de la Lengva que Corre en Todo el Reyno de Chile). More important is the Arte de la Lengua General del Reyno de Chile by the Jesuit Andrés Febrés (1765, Lima) composed of a grammar and dictionary. In 1776 three volumes in Latin were published in Westfalia (Chilidúgú sive Res Chilenses) by the German Jesuit Bernardo Havestadt. The work by Febrés was used as a basic preparation from 1810 for missionary priests going into the regions occupied by the Mapuche people. A corrected version was completed in 1846 and a summary, without a dictionary in 1864. A work based on Febrés' book is the Breve Metodo della Lingua Araucana y Dizionario Italo-Araucano e Viceversa by the Italian Octaviano de Niza in 1888. It was destroyed in a fire at the Convento de San Francisco in Valdivia in 1928.

Modern works

Dictionaries:

• 1916 - Diccionario araucano, by Félix José de Augusta. [1996 reprint by Cerro Manquehue, Santiago.]
• 1960 - Diccionario comentado mapuche-español, by Esteban Erize. Bahía Blanca: Yepun.
• 1995 - Diccionario lingüístico-etnográfico de la lengua mapuche. Mapudungun-español-English, by María Catrileo. Santiago: Andrés Bello.
• 1997 - Diccionario ilustrado mapudungun-español-inglés, by Arturo Hernández & Nelly Ramos. Santiago: Pehuén.
• 2001 - Ranquel-español/español-ranquel. Diccionario de una variedad mapuche de la Pampa (Argentina), by Ana Fernández Garay. Leiden: CNWS (Leiden University).
• 2005 - Mapuche: lengua y cultura. Mapudungun-español-inglés, by Arturo Hernández & Nelly Ramos. Santiago: Pehuén. [5th edition (augmented) of the 1997 dictionary.]

Grammars:

• 1903 - Gramática mapuche bilingüe, by Félix José de Augusta. [1990 reprint by Séneca, Santiago.]
• 1962 - Idioma mapuche, by Ernesto Wilhelm de Moesbach. Padre Las Casas: San Francisco.
• 1989 - A Mapuche grammar, Ph.D. dissertation by Ineke Smeets (Leiden University).
• 1992 - El mapuche o araucano. Fonología, gramática y antología de cuentos, by Adalberto Salas. Madrid: MAPFRE.
• 2000 - Mapudungun, by Fernando Zúñiga. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Manuals:

• 1996 - Manual de aprendizaje del idioma mapuche: Aspectos morfológicos y sintácticos, by Bryan Harmelink. Temuco: Universidad de la Frontera.
• 2002 - Mapudunguyu 1. Curso de lengua mapuche, by María Catrileo. Valdivia: Universidad Austral de Chile.

The most comprehensive works to date are the ones by Augusta (1903, 1916). Salas (1992) is a very good introduction for non-specialists, featuring a solid ethnographic introduction and a very valuable text collection as well. Smeets (1989) and Zúñiga (2000) are for specialists only. Catrileo (1995) and the dictionaries by Hernández & Ramos are welcome and attractive additions to Augusta's older work.

External links

• Spanish-Mapudungun glossary
• Mapudungun-Spanish Dictionary from the U. Católica de Temuco
• Mapuche-Spanish dictionary
• Freelang Dictionary

Bibliography

• Aprueban Alfabeto MaCensos (2005). Encuesta Complementaria de Pueblos Indígenas (ECPI), 2004-2005 - Primeros resultados provisionales. Buenos Aires: INDEC. ISSN 0327-7968.