Mapudungun, the language of the

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 s ...

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 An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...

or Mapudungun alphabets, all of them using

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic 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 southern I ...

, 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: * 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 proposa

by Heinrich Puschmann, based on the Latin alphabet, 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. A more thorough look at the sounds of Mapudungun is available

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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 he uses some letters from the alphabet in an unexpected way. (*) , 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