The Land of the Mapuche

The Mapuche people inhabit a large area of southern Chile between the Itata and Tolten rivers and a portion of Argentina. (ethnologue.com)

The Structure of Mapudungun

Mapudungun utilizes a SOV word order (ethnologue.com) and is a polysynthetic language with noun and verb incorportation. It has a complex agglutinative sufixal verb morphology. Some analyses provide as many as 36 verb suffix slots. (Data Collection and Analysis)

Sound system:

• Prosody: In Mapudungun the stressed sylable is generally the ultima if this is closed (awkán 'game', tralkán 'thunder'), and the penult if the ultima is open (rúka 'house', lóngko 'head'). There is no phonemic tone. (wikipedia.org)
• Vowels: Mapudungun has six vowel phonemes: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ and a high central unrounded vowel, /ɨ/. The last sound is spelled ï, ü or v depending on the alphabet used, and is pronounced as a schwa /ə/ when unstressed. (wikipedia.org)
• Consonants: Mapudungun does not distinguish between voiceless and voiced 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/. /tʂ/ (spelled as "tr", "tx" or even "x") is often described as a /ʧ/ sound followed by a /ɻ/ sound; it is similar to the sound of English tr in tree, but without aspiration. Particularly interesting are the relatively rare interdental sounds t̟, n̟ and l̟, which contrast with their dentoalveolar counterparts; roots may have either only interdental ([l̟afken̟] 'sea, lake') or only dentoalveolar ([lwan] 'guanaco') consonants. (wikipedia.org)

Morphology:

• Nouns in Mapudungun are grouped in two classes, animate and inanimate. This is e.g. reflected in the use of pu as a plural indicator for animate nouns and yuka as the plural for inanimate nouns. (wikipedia.org)
  
• 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. (wikipedia.org)
  

Population estimates

The ethnic population of speakers of Mapudungun, numbering 928,000 (ethnologue.com) live in both Chile and Argentina so the estimates are split up accordingly. Some 200,000 people use the language regularly. (wikipedia.org)

Total Number of Speakers in All Countries:
300,000 (ethnologue.com)
440,000 (wikipedia.org)

In Chile:
200,000 (ethnologue.com)
400,000 (wikipedia.org)

In the Argentine Region
40,000 (wikipedia.org)

Videos

Here are a couple of videos that demonstrate the spoken language of Mapudungun.

Mapuche Creation Story:
This story is told in Mapudungun and has Spanish subtitles.
If you can't see the video go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpBUQ6vtfoI


This is an example of a Mapuche song.
If you can't see the video go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdz1qDqvxWw