María Catrileo Chiguailaf de Codo (born 1944,

Nueva Imperial Nueva Imperial (New Imperial, in English) a city and commune in the south of Chile. It is located in Cautín Province in the Araucanía Region. Nueva Imperial lies about to the west of Temuco, the regional capital. Geography Nueva Imperial is lo ...

) is a native

Mapuche The Mapuche ( (Mapuche & Spanish: )) are a group of indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of Patagonia. The collective term refers to a wide-ranging ethnicity composed of various groups who sha ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and professor of Spanish, English and

Mapudungun language Mapuche (, Mapuche & Spanish: , or Mapudungun; from ' 'land' and ' 'speak, speech') is an Araucanian language related to Huilliche spoken in south-central Chile and west-central Argentina by the Mapuche people (from ''mapu'' 'land' and ''che ...

. Catrileo grew up in the Mapuche community of Rangintulewfü,

Boroa Boroa, is a town in Araucanía, Chile on the shores of Cautín River. The region near the town south of the Cautin River between the Boroa and Quepe Rivers was the Moluche aillarehue of Boroa. The site of the town was founded as a Spanish fort '' ...

. Obtaining her basic education in the community, she finished school at the in La Serena. Afterward, she obtained her Master of Arts in Linguistics at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

with a

Fulbright grant The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...

. She married a

Yoruba The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute ...

man from

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...

, with whom she had Anail Rayén, and taught English and Mapudungun linguistics at the

Austral University of Chile Austral University of Chile ( es, Universidad Austral de Chile or UACh) is a Chilean research university based primarily in Valdivia, with a satellite campus in Puerto Montt. Founded on September 7, 1954, it is one of the eight original Chilean Tr ...

. In 1980, she began working on the ''Diccionario lingüístico-etnográfico de la lengua mapuche'', which was published in 1995. In the late 1990s, she was a volunteer host of '' Wixage anai!'', a

Santiago Santiago (, ; ), also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile as well as one of the largest cities in the Americas. It is the center of Chile's most densely populated region, the Santiago Metropolitan Region, whose ...

-based Mapuche radio program that first aired on 26 June 1993. In 2009, Catrileo received the ''Provincial Prize for Conservation of National Monuments'' for her studies of the native Mapudungun language. Catrileo's work has focused on the

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

and morpho-

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

of the Mapudungun language and specially the

verb form In linguistics, conjugation () is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb ''break'' can be conjugated to form the words ''break'', ...

s. She is considered to be perhaps the only living Mapuche Indian to be a master of Spanish, English and Mapudungun. Currently, she is working at the Institute of Linguistics and Literature of the Austral University of Chile, where she holds courses in Mapudungun.

Books

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References

20th-century Mapuche people 21st-century Mapuche people Mapuche educators Chilean Mapuche people University of Texas at Austin alumni Fulbright alumni Academic staff of the Austral University of Chile Linguists from Chile !Catrileo Living people Indigenous academics of the Americas Mapuche linguists Linguists of Mapuche Mapuche women 21st-century indigenous women of the Americas Chilean women scientists People from Nueva Imperial 1944 births 20th-century linguists 21st-century linguists {{SouthAm-linguist-stub