Mapudungun alphabet
proposed orthographies for the indigenous language
Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche of modern south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, 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, 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, Félix José de Augusta and Ernesto 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 Council of All Lands.
Nhewenh, an online proposal 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mapudungun alphabet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.