Mapudungun
Mapudungun is a language isolate spoken by the Mapuche people in Chile and Argentina. Even after the arrival of the Spaniards, ethnic groups in Argentina such as the Patagonians and the Tehuelche adopted Mapudungun in a process called Araucanization. Today, it has 260,000 speakers, with 250,000 in the Central Valley of Chile and 10,000 in the Argentinian region of Patagonia.
| Mapuche | |
|---|---|
| Mapudungun | |
| Native to | Chile, Argentina |
| Ethnicity | Mapuche |
| Native speakers | 260,000[1] (2007) |
| Language family | Araucanian
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | arn |
| ISO 639-3 | arn |
 Region where most mapuche lived in 2002.
Orange: mapuche at the countryside; dark: mapuche in a city; white: non-mapuche. The circle of a place has an area as if 40 persons from there were living in a square of 1 km side. | |
The name of the boldo tree comes from the Mapudungun word foldo. The poncho was adopted by Spanish and many other languages. It may have come from the Mapudungun word pontro or from the Quechua word punchu.
Mapudungun Media
Chilean proverb written in Mapuche and Chilean Spanish. The Mapudungun alphabet used here does not reflect an agreed-upon standard. In fact, there are three distinct alphabets currently used to write the Mapuche language.
Stressed monophthongs of Mapudungun, from Sadowsky et al. (2013:92)
References
- ↑ M. Crevels (2007): South America, in Encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages, Moseley (ed), Routledge, S.103–196, also Online Ethnologue