ABSTRACT
Mapudungu (also known as Mapuche or Mapuzgun), spoken by at least 300,000 people in parts of central Chile and Argentina, is generally regarded as a virtual language isolate – its only known relative to the south, Huilliche (with which it has very low mutual intelligibility), is spoken by fewer than 2,500 people – the two languages together form the small Araucanian family. When the Spaniards arrived in Chile they found three groups of Araucanians, one of which – the Pikumche (piku ‘north’, che ‘people’) – was speedily conquered. By the eighteenth century the southern group too had all but lost its specific identity. The central group, however, the Mapuche (mapu ‘land’, che ‘people’) has maintained its identity as a socially compact and self-aware indigenous grouping, and, as such, takes second place only to the Quechua-Aymara and the Guaraní. They number perhaps 250,000 in Chile, with a further 80,000 in Argentina; some sources, however, claim total figures well in excess of half a million. The Mapuche call their language Mapudungu (mapu ‘land’, dəŋun ‘to speak’).
