The Mapuche are an indigenous people who live in southern Chile and Argentina. The name Mapuche is composed of two parts: "Mapu", which means land, and "che", which means "people". The Mapuche call their language Mapudungun (or Mapudungu), which is composed of "mapu" (land) and "dungun" (speech). Another word that is sometimes used is the Spanish word for the Mapuche and their language, which is "Araucano" (or in English, "Araucanian"). In this article, I will tell you a little bit about the language of the Mapuche. In the process, I will also teach you a little bit about linguistics, which is the study of how language is organized in our minds.

One job of linguists is to compare languages, and observe the different mechanisms that languages use to communicate similar things. In the study of linguistics, it is important to realize that no language is better than any other language, and even that no dialects are better than any other dialect. The job of linguists is not to tell people how they ought to speak, but rather to describe how language works and try to understand what it is to be human.

That said, let's take a look at how Mapudungun is different from English or Spanish. One difference is that Mapudungun is not a language with a long written tradition. The language was first written down by missionaries, and the orthographic systems they used were adaptations from European languages, and varied from author to author. As a result, the many written documents that exist today do not all necessarily use the same alphabet. The alphabet I will use in this article is the "Unified Alphabet", which has been adopted by many writers and scholars. The relationship between sounds and letters in the Unified Alphabet is very similar to Spanish. Some letters which are different are:

LETTER	SOUND
d =	th (as in the English word "thin")
ü =	a high, center vowel (in-between "i", and "u")
tr =	chr (as in the English word "train")
t =	t (as in the English word "tea")
g =	ch (as in the German name "Bach")
r =	r (as in the Enlish word "red")

There are also several "interdental" sounds in Mapudungun:, which are written t, n, and l (with the letters underlined). These sounds are pronounced by putting your tongue between your teeth.

Another way in which Mapudungun differs from English and Spanish is that there are different pronouns and different endings for the verb, depending on whether you are talking about one person, two person, or three or more people. The following examples show how to conjugate the verb "see" (pe), depending on who the "Actor" is (that is, who is doing the action):

Inche pen	(I see)
eymi peimi	(you see)
fey pei	(he/she/it sees)
Inchiw peiyu	(we two see)
eymu peimu	(you two see)
feyengu peengu	(they two see)
Iñchiñ peiiñ	(we all see)
eymün peimün	(you all see)
feyengün peengün	(they all see)

In contrast, English and Spanish only make a distinction between singular (one person) and plural (two or more people). When speakers of these languages want to communicate the idea that exactly two people were the Actor, they need to make a special effort and use extra words, for example "the two of them saw". In Mapudungun, this information is automatically included in the form of the verb.

The verb in Mapudungun is one of the interesting parts of the language, and where it differs the most from English or Spanish. In all languages, the verb is the part of the sentence that mostly tells us what the action is. In Spanish, depending on how the verb ends, we also know who the Actor is. For example, if I say "Hablo espanol" (I speak Spanish), it means a different thing than "Hablas espanol" (You speak Spanish). Because the verb tells us who the Actor is, we don't even need to say "Yo (I) hablo", or "Tu (You) hablas".

In Mapudungun, the verb tells us what the action is, but it can also give us lots of other information. It tells us who the Actor is, but in addition, it can tell us who the "Undergoer" is - that is, who or what the action is being done to. For example, if I wanted to say "I called my mother", I would say "Mutrümfin ñi ñuke". In this example, we can observe the following elements of Mapudungun:

ELEMENT	MEANING
mütrüm	call
fi	him / her/ them / it (Undergoer)
n	I (Actor)
ñi	my
ñuke	mother

But the verb in Mapudungun isn't limited to just telling us who the participants in the action are. For example, the verb "küdawkülepay" means "she (or he or they or it) is working here". In this example, "küdaw" means "work", "küle", indicates the progressive tense (which tells us that she is working now), "pa" tells us that it's happening here (and not somewhere else), and "y" tells us that the worker is he, she, them, or it (and not me or you). In a real conversation, we would know who the speaker is talking about by the context, and if we didn't, the speaker could always clarify by saying, for exmaple, "Juan küdawkülepay". In addition, there are many other meanings that speakers of Mapudungun can express by changing the verb a little bit.

The information I have presented here is necessarily brief and introductory. If you are interested in learning more about Mapudungun, there are many books and articles you can find in the library. For example, a good instructional text is "Mapudunguyu: Curso de Lengua Mapuche", by María Catrileo. Another good source is Adalberto Salas's "Textos Orales", which comes with spoken examples of words, phrases, and narratives on a cassette tape. If you are looking for a more detailed, linguistic analysis of the language, I would recommend looking for the other books and articles listed in the reference section.

Even without knowing very much about Mapudungun, you can already tell that it is very different from English and Spanish. One of the amazing facts that inspires linguists is that every language is a different and incredibly complex system, yet every single child learns a language without formal instruction. In our search to understand how this is so, it is important to be able to study many diverse languages and compare them. Unfortunately, many languages are in danger of extinction, and Mapudungun is one of them. There are still many speakers of Mapudungun today, but many Mapuche children grow up speaking Spanish more than their native language, or not learning Mapudungun at all. This is a great loss, not only for the culture and identity of the Mapuche people, but also for anyone interested in studying culture and language as a way of understanding what it means to be human.

References

Agusta, F. F. J. d. (1903). Gramática Mapuche Bilingüe. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Seneca.

Arnold, J. (1996). The Inverse System in Mapudungun and Other Languages. Revista de Lingüística Teórica y Aplicada, 34.

Catrileo, M. (1988). Mapudunguyu: Curso de Lengua Mapuche. Universidad Austral de Chile.

Croese, R. (1980). Estudio dialectológico del mapuche. Universidad Austral de Chile, Validivia.

Wilhelm de Moesbach, P. E. (1991). Idioma Mapuche. Villarica, Chile: Imprenta y Editorial "San Francisco".

Ramirez-Sanchez, C. (1989). Voces Mapuches. Valdivia, Chile.

Salas, A. (1984). Textos Orales en Mapuche o Araucano del Centro-Sur de Chile. Concepción, Chile: Editorial de la Universidad de Concepción.

Salas, A. (1992). Lingüística Mapuche. Guía Bibliográfica. Revista Andina, Año 10 (no. 2.).

Smeets, I. (1989). A Mapuche Grammar. Leiden, Holland.