Mapudungun, the language of the

Mapuche The Mapuche ( , ) also known as Araucanians are a group of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of Patagonia. The collective term refers to a wide-ranging e ...

of modern south-central

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and southwestern

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, did not have a writing system when the Spanish arrived. There have been a number of proposals for orthographies or Mapudungun alphabets, all of them using

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

, but no consensus has yet been achieved between authorities, linguists and Mapuche communities on the one to be used. The main systems (in order of proposal) are the following: * Classic, used since 1890 by Rodolfo Lenz, Felix de Augusta y Wilhelm de Moesbach; among other corpora for the biographic narrations provided by Pascual Coña in 1926. * Alfabeto Mapuche Unificado ("''Unified Alphabet''"), used by Chilean and Mapuche linguists and used in most of the scientific literature about the language. * Grafemario ''Raguileo'', made by Anselmo Raguileo Lincopil (1922–1992), who was a linguist of Mapuche origin. This orthography is supported by the indigenous Mapuche organization '' Consejo de Todas las Tierras''. * Nhewenh, an online proposalhttps://web.archive.org/web/20010224014640/http://www.ict.uchile.cl/~hpuschma/mapuche/mapuspelsnd.html by Heinrich Puschmann, based on the latin character set to facilitate international usage on the Internet. * Azumchefi (also called ''Azümchefe''), proposed by the Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena (CONADI) as a summary of about six earlier proposals, and recognized by the Chilean Ministry of Education, but not widely used. *Wirizüŋun, of unknown origin. A more thorough look at the sounds of Mapudungun is available here.

Consonants

Mapudungun has the following consonant system. (*) Raguileo does not distinguish between and or between and . Also, Raguileo aims to use only one grapheme for each phoneme (no digraphs) so it uses some letters from the alphabet in an unexpected way. Wirizüŋun also does not distinguish between and . (*) , which is spelled "tr" is also pronounced [].

Vowels

Mapudungun has six vowels. The three high vowels also have corresponding approximant consonants.

References

Bibliography

* {{Language alphabets Latin alphabets .Alphabet