Mapuche language

The Mapuche, Mapudungún (from the autoglotonym mapudungun 'language of the land') or araucano, It is the language of the Mapuches, an Amerindian people who inhabit the current countries of Chile and Argentina. Its number of active speakers is estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 and the number of passive speakers at about 100,000 more. It has influenced the lexicon of Spanish in its area of distribution and, in turn, theirs has incorporated loanwords languages of Spanish and Quechua. It has not been satisfactorily classified and is currently considered a language isolate.

Since 2013, it is an official language, along with Spanish, in the Chilean commune of Galvarino, where approximately 9,100 indigenous people live.

Linguistic classification

They will be written in Chilean Mapudungun and Spanish. The writing used for Mapudungun does not follow any standard.

There is no agreement among experts about the relationship between Mapudungun and other American languages and it is classified as a language isolate or, more cautiously, as an unclassified language awaiting definitive evidence that can relate it to other languages.

In a 1970 publication, Stark considered Mapudungun a language related to the Mayan languages of Mesoamerica and, the following year, Hamp asserted the same. In 1973 Stark affirmed that the Mapuche language descended from a language that he called "yucha", which would be the sister of the proto-Maya and also the ancestor of the Yungas languages of the northern coast of Peru and the Uru-Chipaya languages: the Uruquilla of the uros that currently inhabit the islands of Lake Titicaca, Peru-Bolivia, and Chipaya, spoken in the Bolivian department of Oruro. This second proposal was rejected that same year by Campbell.

First page Art of the King's General Language of Chile (1765), work of Andrés Febrés.

The investigations of Mary R. Key, published in 1978 and the following years, consider Mapudungun to be related to other Chilean languages: Kawésqar and Yagán, both spoken by nomadic canoeists in the southern zone and on the verge of disappearing, and with the Chon languages of Patagonia, some extinct and others close to it. However, according to this author, there is an even closer relationship between Mapudungun and the Pano-Tacana languages of Bolivia and Peru, a relationship that Loos had also pointed out in 1973. Key also proposes relationships with the Mosetén and Yuracaré languages of the east. Bolivian.

In 1987, the American linguist Joseph Greenberg proposed a classification system for American languages in which the Amerindian family included the vast majority of the continent's languages, until then grouped into multiple independent families. Eskimo-Aleut family and the Na-Dené family. According to this classification, Mapudungun would be part of the Andean languages and, within them, of the southern group, together with Alacalufe, Gennaken, Patagon and Yagán. For Greenberg, "Araucanian" was not an individual language but a subgroup made up of four languages: Araucanian, Mapuche, Moluche, and Pehuenche. However, the mass comparison method used by Greenberg is controversial and disputed, Therefore, many linguists do not accept the existence of an Amerindian family or do not consider that the available information allows us to affirm it.

Viegas Barros disputes part of the postulates of Key and Greenberg by assuring that there is no relationship between Mapudungun and the «chon» languages, nor between these two with Kawésqar and Yagán.

Croese (1987) raised the possibility of kinship with the languages of the Arawak family, spoken in northeastern South America and the Caribbean. Díaz-Fernández also proposed a list of possible cognates between Mapudungun and the reconstruction of Proto-Maipurean.

Other authorities, such as SIL International, classify it as one of the two languages that make up the Araucanian family, along with Huilliche, usually classified as a divergent dialect.

Description

Phonology and phonetics

In a study of nine native Mapudungun speakers between the ages of 40 and 62 from Huapi Island, Sadowsky (2013) identifies the following 6 vowel phonemes as part of the Mapudungun vowel inventory:

• One of the novelties of the phenogenetic inventory identified by Sadowsky (2013) is the existence of the vocálico fonema /// and its respective alophone [.], which previously Smeets (2008) and Echeverría & Contreras (1965) had identified as fonema / con/ with an alophone [.], respectively.
• 1 The fonema / waln/ is presented in terms like pin [p].n], “say”; piku kürüf [p].'k^h√^h,',f ], "North Wind"; or tiyechi [.ët fastening ], «that one».
• 2 The fonema is presented in words like piku [ p...^h♫ ], "norte" or [ wë'l♫ "but."
• 3 Fonema / El/ tends to appear slightly higher in accented syllables, while its alophone ([. ]) tends to appear in non-centered syllables. For example, fütra [ f».х».h».], "great", "great" or "old".

The Mapudungun consonant inventory is made up of the following phonemes:

* The phonemic value of these consonants is disputed.

• ¹ The distinction between alveolar consonants and interdental consonants is in reverse or has disappeared between young speakers and in different areas, such as almost all of Argentina. This loss of opposition can mean both the use of alveolar and interdental consonants in all contexts or the free variation between both joints. The preservation or loss of the distinction between alveolar and interdental consonants has generated various studies focusing on various Mapuche-speaking areas. In the case of the localities of Toltén and Mariquina, Marquez (2017) concludes that the Mapudungun speakers of this sector maintain the distinction between the interdental and alveolar variables only in the cases of the lateral consonants ([ l ] and [ l̪ ]) and deaf occlusive consonants ([ t ] and [ t), ]), but not so in the case of nasal consonants ([ n ] and [ n). ]). On the other hand, in the case of the Pehuenche dialect of the High Biobío, the interdental consonants [ l.], [ n. ] and [ t. ] have practically become extinct. With regard to this distinction, the recognition of interdental consonants as seals and not as alophones only remains a matter of debate.
• ² The fricatives /f/ and /θ/ are consonant deaf ([f] or [.] and [θ]) for most of the speakers, who live in the province of Cautin and surrounding area. But in other areas, such as the pehuenche area, they are sound consonants that are performed respectively [v] or [β] and [ð]. Mapuche loans incorporated into Spanish in the colonial period mainly come from places where these consonants pronounced sound, so that words like fouuAyllafilu, diwka o Dalkawe were castellanized as boldo, Aillavilú, diuca and Dalcahue. On the other hand, the toponyms of Araucania and Patagonia, incorporated into Chile and Argentina in the centuryXIXcontain deaf consonants, such as Chod Malal, chastelanized Chos Malal, or Fütra.ewfü, adapted as Futaleufú.
• ³ It is a newly introduced consonant to Mapudungun and almost always alternates with θ, with MIN or..
• ⁴ The retrofleja sound fricative [ ] and the approach [ ] vary freely in any position.
• ⁵ This fonema has two alophones in complementary distribution, is performed as a fricative to watch sound [▪] in the premargin ([]="Name"), and as the approaching watch [ ] at the end ([lɨɰ]= "white"..

The syllables do not admit successions of consonants or vowels, as well as plosives or affricates in final position, /ɣ/ in initial position, or syllables such as wo, wu or yi. Therefore, syllables can have the structure V, VC, CV, CVC, with the aforementioned restrictions. In loanwords from Spanish, clusters of consonants sometimes occur (krus < cruz, plata < plata), but it is usual in these cases to avoid their formation by introducing of [ə] between the two consonants (kapüra < goat, fülor < flower). In relaxed speech, sequences such as [fwi] or [pja] can be formed by diphthongization of vowels of different syllables.

Accent

The tonic accent has no phonemic value and varies depending on the neighboring words, the emphasis or the presence of diphthongs, among others. In disyllabic words it is usually true that when both syllables are open (ending in a vowel) or both are closed (ending in a consonant), the stress falls on the latter. In the event that only one of the two is closed, the accent will fall on it. Some examples:

ruka ‘casa’

♫♪ ‘we’

narki ‘gato’

küye y ‘luna’.

In words of more than two syllables that have the last two open or closed, the stress falls on the penultimate one. If only one of the two is closed, it will be the one that is accentuated:

williche ‘huilliche’

ülkanTun ‘chanting’

pichiwentru ‘niño’

mapudu- ‘ Mapuche tongue’.

Intonation

There is fluctuation in the pronunciation of the consonants according to the mood of the speaker, and it is considered that there are three «tones»: affectionate, neutral and derogatory. Despite recognizing this fact, an exact delimitation of the way in which consonants fluctuate cannot be made, since it is a highly variable phenomenon between people or even in the same person under different situations.

Example:
Affectionate: Feychi kushe (‘That little old lady’).
Neuter: Feychi kuse (‘That old woman’)
Derogatory: Feyti kude (‘That old woman’)

Grammar

It is a polysynthetic language with nominal incorporation and radical composition. Broadly speaking, this means that words are formed by the agglutination of morphemes and lexical elements to such a degree that a single word may require translation into other languages for a complete sentence.

• Example:

Word: Trarimansunparkelayayngu

Components: trari-mansun-pa-rke-la-(y)-a-y-ngu

Gloss: ceñir-buey-CISLOCATIVE-SORPRESA-NEGATION EPENTÉTIC SONING)-FUTURO-MODO REAL-3.a PERS. DUAL

Translation“The two will not help the oxen here!”

Gender and grammatical number

Nouns can belong to the category of animate (people and animals) or to that of inanimate, and this affects the formation of their plural. Sex is indicated by lexical means, such as wentru pichiche ('man-child') and domo pichiche ('woman-child'); alka achawall ('male-chicken') and domo achawall ('female-chicken') or alka ('rooster') and achawall ('chicken'). The animate-inanimate opposition is reflected in the use of pu as a plural marker before nouns denoting animate objects; in the speech of the bishopric of Santiago of the s. XVI, described by Valdivia in 1606, yüka was attached to inanimate nouns to indicate the plural.

The grammatical number is expressed mainly in the verb endings, but there is also the pluralizer (distributive according to Smeets) -ke for adjectives and the aforementioned pu for animated nouns. In verbs, the number can be singular, dual or plural and the plurality of the predicate can be indicated with the suffix -ye; in the southern dialects ("huilliche"), the dual has fallen into disuse and has been replaced by the plural.

• Example:

Word: Wüdaleaiñ May, pu koaa

Components: wüda-le-a-i-n may pu ko (aseparation-RESULTATIVE-FUT-MODO REAL-1.a PER-PL.- therefore -PLU-collaborator)

Translation: We separateWe therefore, collaboratorThat's it..

Pronouns

There are nine personal pronouns in the Mapudungun of the Araucanía Region, while in the Huilliche dialect of the Osorno coast there are only six, due to the lack of the dual.

There is a complex system to indicate to the agents and to the patients of an action. For this, relatively regular suffixes are used within a hierarchy of relevance in which if the agent is above the patient, a "direct" form is used and otherwise an "inverse" form is used. For example, the first person is above the third, so "I to him" uses the direct form -fiñ and "he to me" uses the inverse form -enew. When the participants are two thirds, you can choose a "direct" form -fi or an inverse -eyew.

Usually the pronoun fey is used for all verbs in the third person without adding the dual and plural marks engu and engün, that are only added when it is necessary to avoid some ambiguity.

Some interrogative pronouns are: iney 'who?', chem 'what?', chew 'where?', chumngelu 'why?', tuntem 'how much?'.

Verb

• The verbs can be transient or intransitive, neutral or impersonal and are combined in the three people and the three numbers (singular, dual, plural), with active and passive voices and three modes: indicative, imperative and hypothetical. The verbs may include information about where the action, its completeness or the certainty that the speaker has of what counts, among others. In addition, denial is incorporated into the conjugated form.
• Loans taken from Spanish are generally adapted to the mapudungu in the form of the third person of the singular. An example is the verb mapudungu "power" which is "pwede".

The paradigm for the present indicative for an intransitive verb like konün ‘entrar’ is as follows:

In transitive verb forms such as pen 'to see', you can see what some authors have described as a reverse system (similar to those described for the Algonquian languages). The 'intransitive' forms are as follows:

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

Lexicon

Compound words are common in Mapudungun. Some examples are the words küdawfe, “worker”, küdawwe “workplace”, which derive From küdaw, "work."

The analysis of the Vocabulario de la Lengua de Chile by Luis de Valdivia, the first Mapudungun vocabulary on record, reveals that 8.16% of the entries in the text show similarities with Quechua Of this percentage, 166 words were identified as Quechua words, that is, words of Quechua origin. Some examples of these loans would be pun ("night"), puchu («cloudy») and huancu («carob»). According to Moulian, Catrileo & Landeo (2015), the presence of these Quechuisms in Mapudungun can be explained by the expansion of Tawantinsuyo in the central-southern area of what is now Chile.

Some Quechuisms still remain in Mapudungun and are part of words in common use in this language. For example, Zúñiga (2006) assimilates pataka ("one hundred") and warangka ("thousand") with the terms pachak and waranqa from Ayachuan Quechua, which have the same meaning.

Another of the languages that has notoriously influenced the lexicon of Mapudungun is Spanish. Loanwords of Spanish origin can be found in several semantic fields, such as days of the week and months among contemporary speakers.

Words such as poncho (pontro) and a large number of names of trees, plants and animals from the region inhabited by the Mapuches (coigüe < ) have passed into Spanish from Mapudungún. koywe,quillay < küllay; copihue < kopiwe; coypu < koypu, degu < dewü, pudú < püdü or püdu, etc). In the twenty-second edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (DRAE), there are 302 terms of Mapuche origin that cover different semantic fields.

Writing

The Mapuches did not have writing when the conquerors arrived, so the Latin alphabet is used to transcribe it. The studies of Augusta, Moesbach, and Lenz led to the invention of new alphabets that were less influenced by the Spanish script. In the XXI century, seven or eight main graphemaries are used to write Mapudungún, of which the following three are the most accepted:

• The Unified Alphabet: produced by the Chilean Society of Linguistics in 1986, it is a Roman alphabet with special digits and letters (ch,:,,, ñ, ng, tr, γ,), ü) which consists of the following twenty-seven letters:

a, ch, d, e, f, g, i, k, l, ḻ, ll, m, n, ṉ, ñ, ng, o, p, r, s, t, ṯ, tr, u, u, w, and.

• The Raguileo: produced by Anselmo Raguileo in 1982, is a Roman alphabet whose characteristic is that each sound of the language is represented by a single letter, so it is constituted by the following twenty-six letters:

a, c, z, e, f, q, i, k, l, b, j, m, n, h, ñ, g, o, p, r, s, t, x, u, v, w, and.

• The Grafemario Azümchefe: created by the National Indigenous Development Corporation, CONADI, is promoted by the Chilean State and combines characteristics of the previous two; its twenty-eight letters are in an unconventional order, so that the first ones almost coincide with the word azümchefe“person who teaches”:

a, z, ü, m, ch, e, f, i, k, t, nh, tx, o, y, q, g, lh, ñ, r, s, ll, p, u, w, l, n, sh, t'.

The version of Windows XP in Mapudungún, released on October 30, 2006, uses this Grafemario Azümchefe.

In a syllabary of the Chilean Ministry of Education, published in the early 1990s, the Adentu Nemul was presented, a triangular spelling from right to left, which was said to have been invented by the Mapuches, but that looks like a fraud.

The following table compares the letters used by the Unified Alphabet, the Grafemario Raguileo and the Grafemario Azümchefe to represent the sounds of the Mapuche language.

None of these alphabets is accepted by the majority, which makes it difficult for some readers to read or write.

Mapuche Studies

The first Mapuche grammar was published by the Jesuit Father Luis de Valdivia in 1606 (Arte y Gramática General de la Lengva that runs throughout the Kingdom of Chile). More important is the Art of the General Language of the Kingdom of Chile, by the Jesuit Andrés Febrés (Lima, 1765), composed of a grammar and dictionary. In Westphalia in 1776, Chilidúgú sive Res Chilenses..., three volumes in Latin, by the German Jesuit priest Bernardo Havestadt, was published. According to Rodolfo Lenz, this work had its final redaction in Spanish in 1765.

Febrés' work was basic in the preparation of priests for religious missions in the areas inhabited by the Mapuches after 1810. A version corrected by Hernández Calzada was published in 1846 and a summary, without the dictionary, in 1864. A later work based on the work of Febrés is the Breve Metodo della Lingua Araucana y Dizionario Italo-Araucano e Viceversa by Octaviano de Niza, an Italian Capuchin, in 1888. Destroyed in the fire at the Convent of San Francisco in Valdivia in 1928.

With the arrival of Rodolfo Lenz in Chile in 1890, modern phonetic and linguistic studies of Mapudungun began. It is no longer a question of a pedagogical purpose such as the preparation of priests, but of scientific research. The first pioneering results are the writings of Lenz published in the Annals of the University of Chile between 1895-1897. Reprinted as Estudios Araucanos, preceded by Introduction to Araucanian Studies of 1896. Equally important within this trend are Gramática Araucana (1903), Araucanian Readings (1910) and the Araucanian-Spanish Dictionary; Spanish-Mapuche (1916) by Fray Félix José Kathan de Augusta, a Bavarian Capuchin. In addition to Voz de Arauco (1944), an etymological study by Fray Ernesto Wilhelm de Moesbach and the memoirs of Pascual Coña first published in 1930 under the title [[Life and customs of the indigenous Araucanians in the second half of the XIX century and Moesbach as author. Since then, a series of more modern investigations in its linguistic, phonetic and lexical approach have proceeded, among them El mapuche o araucano by Adalberto Salas and A Grammar of Mapuche, Ineke Smeets doctoral thesis.

Historical, social and cultural aspects

Denominations

Its speakers call the language mapudungun or mapundungun 'speaks of the land', mapuchedungun or mapunchedungun 'speaks of the Mapuches' and chedungun 'speaks of the people'. The names it received in Spanish during the time of the Spanish conquest and colonization were araucano, lengua de Chile, lengua general de Chile and also Chilidüngu which means "language of Chile". The term araucano was coined during the Conquest of Chile to refer to the people and their language and was commonly used until the XX, however, the rejection it provokes among the Mapuches has led to a gradual abandonment of its use in the places where they inhabit and the increasing use of the «Mapuche language» or Mapudungun. The term mapudungun means 'speaks the land', that is, the language of the country or the native language as opposed to Spanish (wingkadungun 'speaks the foreigners'), and is estimated to have emerged late, while chedungun would be an older denomination that remains in use in peripheral areas of language use.

History

The theory about the origin of the Mapuches that Ricardo E. Latcham postulated and that enjoyed acceptance for a time, pointed out that a warrior people came from the east, introduced itself between Picunches and Huilliches, imposing their language and culture on them, however, others indicate that the displaced peoples were the ones who spoke Mapudungun, and the invaders adopted it. Current theories consider that the origin of the people and their language is most likely to be found in the current Chilean territory, from hunter-gatherer populations from the Central Zone, which would have become sedentary.

Central area of the Mapuche population 2002 by communes. Orange: rural mapuches; dark: urban mapuches; white: non-mapuche population. The areas of the circles correspond to 40 inhabitants per km2.

Mapudungun vocabulary (parts of the head).

When the Spanish arrived in the mid-XVI century, the language was spoken by the peoples who inhabited the Intermediate Depression and part of the coast, in an undefined limit between the Limarí and Choapa valleys to the north and the Chiloé archipelago to the south, in an extension of about 1800 km. Historians and anthropologists consider that the Mapuche-speaking populations of the time would be the groups that Chilean researchers know as Picunches, Mapuches proper, Huilliches and Cuncos, while they called themselves che ("people »). Despite this, the missionaries and chroniclers assured that the differences were minimal and that with this General Language of Chile it was possible to travel throughout that territory without having to know another. spread from the transfers made during the Spanish colonization. For example, at the end of the XVI century, some 500 Mapuche product of the war were taken into exile in the valley of Coquimbo and La Serena from Arauco. However, the abundant Mapuche toponymy in the Coquimbo region, existing even further north, raises the possibility of the language's presence at least during Inca times, or even before this.

During the colonial era (s. XVII and XVIII), the use of the language gradually decreased north of Biobío. The Picunches, who speak a particular dialect, disappeared in part due to the death of their members due to illnesses, the working conditions of the encomienda, and wars. Many of them avoided the work of the encomienda by mixing with Spaniards. In this way, by law, their descendants could not belong to the encomienda system, becoming part of the lower Spanish people and society at the cost of losing their identity and culture.

On the contrary, to the south of the Biobío river and up to the Chacao channel, after the battle of Curalaba in 1598 and the consequent destruction of the seven cities in the area, Mapudungun continued to be the usual language, being spoken by the Mapuches not submitted to the Spanish crown. Between the 17th and 19th centuries" the process of Araucanization of the Pampas and Patagonia took place, which extended the area of Mapuche influence to the east. In this process of expansion for commercial and political purposes, various nomadic groups came into contact with the Mapuches, sometimes violently. As a result, these peoples underwent a process of acculturation in which they gradually abandoned their previous languages and adopted Mapudungun, in some cases conserving them in a situation of bilingualism or diglossia. This happened with the Pehuenches, people of the Araucarias, of whose previous language there are no records, with peoples of the Pampas, with various peoples known as Puelches ("people of the east"), of which a group preserved the language in Argentina gününa yajüch until 1960. Mapuches traveling east joined these Mapuchized peoples and adopted their nomadic customs, giving rise to the Ranquel and other groups that during the century XIX continued their expansion to the south and west, extending the Mapuche language to almost all of Argentine Patagonia, partially displacing the Tehuelche language, which has been on the verge of extinction since late XX century, and Teushen, a related language, or a northern dialect of its own that disappeared around 1915.

In the Chiloé archipelago, the Mapudungun-speaking population had been established for a few centuries and lived alongside the Chonos and other canoeists who spoke a different language or several. The Spanish conquerors settled on the islands from 1567, they dominated the Huilliches who inhabited it, imposing their language and customs on them. However, after the battle of Curalaba, this Spanish possession was isolated from the rest of the kingdom of Chile and in the conditions of high miscegenation and cultural mix that occurred in the two centuries that this situation lasted, Spaniards of all walks of life spoke Spanish. and Mapudungún, in their Veliche dialect, alike. In this regard, the English castaway John Byron pointed out that the Spanish preferred to use the indigenous language because they considered it "more beautiful" and at the same time the governor Narciso de Santa María complained that the Spaniards expressed themselves poorly in Spanish and well in Spanish. veliche, and that the second language was used more. Towards the end of the XVIII century a priest noted that there was already more familiarity with Castilian between Spaniards and Huilliches, but that confessions continued to be made in Veliche. This change in the situation in favor of Castilian was due in principle to the provisions issued by the metropolis on the promotion of the Spanish language in America. After the annexation of the archipelago to Chile in 1826, the creation of schools in which Spanish was taught increased and around 1900 the Veliche dialect had already become extinct and only records of it remain in a book called "Estudios de la lengua veliche" and in the influence it exerted on the Spanish of Chiloé.

At the beginning of the XIX century, the War of Independence of Chile and Argentina began and the Mapuche factions took sides both by "realists" and "patriots" and accompanied the armies in their battles. In many cases, the combatants brought their families and, if they died in battle, their wives and children were killed or captured by the victors and taken to live in Chilean society. In this regard, the English traveler Maria Graham recounted in her diary that there were Mapuche girls who were under the protection of Bernardo O'Higgins, who is considered the Father of the Homeland of Chile, since they had been orphaned after going with their parents to the battlefield; In one episode, she recounts that he talked to the little girls "in Araucanian" so that she could hear how the language sounded. O'Higgins would have learned the language in childhood, while he attended the Chillán Natural College, because the sons of the surrounding loncos also went there.

In 2014, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Welsh colonization in Argentina, a multilingual (Spanish-Welsh-Mapudungun) signage project was carried out in the city of Trevelin to be placed in the main places of the city. The local Deliberative Council declared it of "tourist-cultural interest". As part of the same celebration, in the city of Trelew, in 2015, a free basic Mapuche language course called "kimche, introductory workshop on mapudungum».

Number of speakers

The number of Mapuches in Chile, according to the 2002 Census, is 604,349, mostly in the Araucanía Region, in the city of Santiago, and to a lesser extent in the Biobío Region, the Los Lagos Region, and the Los Ríos, of which an undetermined portion speak Mapudungun. In Argentina there are an estimated 113,680 Mapuche, according to the Encuesta Complementaria de Pueblos Indígenas (ECPI) 2004-2005 based on the 2001 Census, most of them would live in Neuquén, Río Negro and Chubut. The 2010 Argentine census indicates that 205,009 people self-identified as Mapuche and the 2017 Chilean census adds that 1,745,147 Chileans declared themselves to belong to the ethnic group.

It has been defined that "Mapudungún is the Amerindian language with the greatest validity in present-day Chile." language and another 18% understand it but do not speak it. This would be equivalent to some 100,000 Mapuches in Chile using it actively and the same number are passive speakers. For their part, Mapuche organizations differ greatly from those figures, according to studies by Perla Golbert in 1975 and Robert Croese in 1982, there would be 440,000 speakers, four hundred thousand in Chile and the rest in Argentina; of these, half would be active speakers. The American linguist Lyle Campbell estimated in 1991 at 250,000 speakers in Chile and another 100,000 in Argentina. The most bullish estimates, made by Mapuche researchers Marta Beretta and Dario y Tulio Cañumil, state that "it is estimated that there are just under 700,000 Mapuzugun speakers approximately, and despite the threat of extinction, it survives today." According to subsequent research,

[...] the contact of the Mapudungun (sustrate) with the Spanish (superstrate) has strongly impacted the indigenous language. In fact, according to recent data (CEP 2006), only 14% of the total Mapuche population (urban and rural) has a competent management of their language, that is, speaks it and understands it better or equal to Spanish, and only 30% have some knowledge of the language, without becoming competent in it. If we add both percentages, we find that only 44% of the Mapuches know their native language to some extent. If this low domain in qualitative and quantitative terms adds that, of this 44%, only 18% use the Mapudungun every day and only 8% use it to speak regularly with children, we can appreciate that the vitality of this language is in retreat. (Castillo Fadic, M.N. and Sologuren Insua, E., 2011).

Dialects

Towards the beginning of the XVII century European testimonies affirm that Mapuche was spoken throughout the territory between La Serena and Chiloé (see the mapudungun of the bishopric of Santiago).

From the first moment, the high uniformity of the language was pointed out even when its domain was very large, compared to the domain of the majority of indigenous languages of America. In 1606, the priest Luis de Valdivia wrote:

...in the entire Kingdom of Chile no more alas of this language that runs from the city of Coquimbo and its termins, to the Chilue yslas and later, by space of almost four hundred leagues from North to South... because although in diuerous provinces destos Indians ay some different vocablos, but they are not all the verbs and general aduerbs are the rules Art and (Original spelling).

Valdivia, 1606, The Reader in Art and grammar of the general lengva that runs throughout the King of Chile, with Vocabulary and Confessional vn

Valdivia published two versions of some religious texts, one in the Santiago variety and the other in the La Imperial variety, which differ in some words and in some verbal suffixes.

Mapudungun comprises several highly intelligible dialects. His classification, which is still valid to a high degree, as suggested by the more recent work of R. A. Croese (1980), goes back to Rodolfo Lenz (1895-1897). According to this division, there are three large groups of surviving dialects in the Chilean territory:

• Picunche (‘North People’): In the South of the Biobío Region, where its speakers call it chedungun (“to speak human”), and in the north of the region of La Araucanía (the province of Malleco), in the Intermediate Depression. It should not be confused with the talk of the picunches, recorded by Luis de Valdivia at the beginning of the centuryXVII not with the picunche of Argentina.
• Moluche-pehuenche
  • Moluche (‘center’), or nguluche (‘Western people’), is the most widespread variant and based on most works about the language. In Argentina it is spoken from Limay to Lake Nahuel Huapi; in Chile, it is the dialect of Cautin. For those who use this variety, the language is called Mapudungun or, in the south of Cautín and north of Los Ríos, mapundungun.
  • Pehuenche (‘Araucaria’s people’): their speakers also call it chedungun; in Argentina it is spoken in Neuquén and in Chile, in the Alto Biobío.
• Huilliche (‘Southern people’): in Argentina we speak in the region of Lake Nahuel Huapi; and the ranquelche in Chalileo, General Acha and in the Colorado River; in Chile, on the coast of Osorno and Chiloé. Speakers of the coast of Osorno call it chesungun, it is very influenced by Spanish and is sometimes considered a separate language. Chiloé's veliche was extinguished at the end of the centuryXIX and the few speakers of the language on the island use the Osornin variant, introduced in the mid 1930s.

Croese subdivides the three previous groups into eight groups, although this last finer division has been criticized, because they do not seem so consistent, nor so clearly differentiated and according to Adalberto Salas and other authors, he would have used lexical elements and phonics that can occur in free variation in the same speaker and are not exclusive to a single area.

In the north of Neuquén, in the Minas Department area and in the Ñorquín Department, a variety known as picunche is spoken.

In the Argentine province of Chubut, a variety with a Puelche substratum has been identified on the Somuncurá plateau and another with a Tehuelche substratum in the southwest of the province, which preserve a particular lexicon and consonants of the displaced languages that survive as allophones of the Mapuche consonants.