🇨🇱Mapudungun for English speakers

1. Mapudungun: the speech of the land

Mapudungun is the language of the Mapuche, spoken in south-central Chile — principally the Araucanía region around Temuco — and in west-central Argentina, in Neuquén and Río Negro.¹² The name is transparent: mapu 'land' plus dungun 'speech'. Mapuche, the name of the people, is mapu plus che 'people'.

Even the name of the language is written more than one way — Mapudungun, Mapuzugun, Mapunzugun, Mapudungu, Chezugun — and that is not sloppiness. It is the first visible consequence of the fact that Mapudungun has no agreed writing system, which is the single most important thing to understand before you learn anything else. Section 3 deals with it properly.

A word about older names. Araucanian, Araucano and Auca appear throughout the older literature and in some databases. They are exonyms of colonial origin and are now largely avoided in community-preferred usage.¹ Use Mapudungun for the language and Mapuche for the people; keep the old names only as search keys for pre-1980s bibliography.

Mapudungun at a glance

2. How many speakers — and why every number needs its definition

The ethnic Mapuche population is large, around 1,718,000.² The number of speakers is much smaller, falling, and genuinely contested, because different studies count different things.

Speaker figures by date and definition

The transmission figures in the last row are the ones to carry away. A language can have a quarter of a million speakers and still be in serious trouble if almost none of them are speaking it to children — and that is what the 2013 data describes.² Glottolog rates Mapudungun AES 'shifting' and 'Threatened', noting that a strong decline in intergenerational transfer has taken place.¹

Note also what Mapudungun is not. No strong source applies 'critically endangered' to Mapudungun proper; Huilliche, the southern variety, is rated severely endangered separately.¹² Overstating the case is its own kind of inaccuracy.

Reader A1 — Mari mari — greeting and naming

Constructed for this guide from the Unificado core of the deck below, by someone who does not speak Mapudungun. It is a vocabulary drill in sentence form, not a Mapuche text, and it has not been reviewed by a speaker. Section 10 lists writing by Mapuche authors, which is what you should actually read.

Mari mari. Iñche Ana pingen. Mapuche ngen. Iñche mapu mew mülen. Kiñe ruka nien. Ñi ruka pichi ka küme. Ruka mew mülen ñi chaw, ñi ñuke, ka ñi peñi. Ñi chaw fücha. Ñi ñuke fücha kafey. Ñi peñi pichi. Iñchiñ küme mülen. Ñi ruka mapu mew müley, lafken mew müten.

— Hello. I am called Ana. I am Mapuche. I live in the land. I have a house. My house is small and good. In the house are my father, my mother and my brother. My father is old. My mother is old too. My brother is small. We live well. My house is in the countryside, near the sea.

Ñi chaw kimün mapudungun. Ñi ñuke kimün kafey. Iñche pichi kimün, welu kimün küpa. Fachantü mapudungun dungun. Wüle doy dungun. Ñi chaw feypi: kimünge mapudungun, ka dungunge fachantü. Feypin: may. Ñi ñuke feypi: küme dungu. Iñche ayün ñi chaw ka ñi ñuke.

— My father knows Mapudungun. My mother knows it too. I know a little, but I want to know. Today I speak Mapudungun. Tomorrow I will speak more. My father says: know Mapudungun, and speak it today. I said: yes. My mother says: a good thing. I love my father and my mother.

Ko pütokon. Kofke in. Ilo in kafey. Antü küme. Kürüf küme. Lafken fücha ka kallfü. Antü mew lafken kallfü ngey. Pun mew lafken kurü ngey. Trewa nien. Ñi trewa pichi ka kurü. Ñarki nien kafey. Ñi ñarki umawtun antü mew. Iñche ayün ñi mapu. Wüle doy dungun. Pewkayal.

— I drink water. I eat bread. I eat meat too. The sun is good. The wind is good. The sea is big and blue. In the sun the sea is blue. At night the sea is black. I have a dog. My dog is small and black. I have a cat too. My cat sleeps in the sun. I love my land. Tomorrow I will speak more. Goodbye.

Read the label above that reader again, because it applies to all six. These are vocabulary drills written by a non-speaker. They use short sentences at every level because the alternative — composing elaborate Mapudungun to hit a word count — would produce confident-looking text that no one has checked. The readers get harder in what they talk about, not in how they talk.

3. The grafemarios: several ways to write, and no agreement

Mapudungun was traditionally an oral language; the Mapuche had no writing system before the Spanish arrived, and the earliest grammars are colonial — Valdivia 1606, Febrés 1765.²⁶ Today it is written in the Latin script, but through several competing orthographies called grafemarios, which coexist without consensus among linguists, institutions and Mapuche communities.⁴⁵

The principal grafemarios

What that looks like in practice

One word, three systems²

The systematic differences: /tʃ/ is written ch or c; /ŋ/ is written g or ng; Raguileo writes v where Unificado writes ü, x where Unificado writes tr, j for ll, z for d.² Once you see the pattern, cross-reading gets much easier — which is why this guide shows the pattern rather than hiding one system.

This guide teaches the Alfabeto Mapuche Unificado, because it is the most widely used in published materials and among Chilean linguists.² That is a practical choice for a global learner audience and not a verdict. The dossier's own guidance is followed: pick one grafemario, apply it consistently, note that others exist, and do not present any single system — including the state's Azümchefe — as 'the standard'.

Be warned that the deck attached to this guide is honest about a split it could not resolve. Its first 66 rows are Unificado. Everything after them was harvested from English Wiktionary, whose Mapudungun entries are written predominantly in Raguileo, and those rows are reproduced in Raguileo rather than transliterated, because converting them would have meant applying a grapheme mapping this build never checked against a primary orthography manual. The deck's source note explains this at length. It is a real limitation and it is labelled rather than smoothed over.

4. Pronouns: singular, dual, plural

Mapudungun pronouns distinguish three numbers, not two. Alongside singular and plural there is a dual — a form meaning exactly two.²⁹ English speakers routinely miss this and say 'we' when the language wants 'we two'.

The pronoun paradigm, in Unificado spelling²

Nouns are grouped into animate and inanimate classes; pu is the animate plural marker, chi and ti function as definite animate articles, and kiñe 'one' doubles as the indefinite article.² There is no grammatical gender.

Reader A2 — Ruka mew — the household

Constructed for this guide from the Unificado core of the deck below, by someone who does not speak Mapudungun. It is a vocabulary drill in sentence form, not a Mapuche text, and it has not been reviewed by a speaker. Section 10 lists writing by Mapuche authors, which is what you should actually read.

Ñi ruka mew mülen iñchiñ. Ñi chaw, ñi ñuke, ñi peñi ka iñche. Iñchiw ñi peñi amun lafken mew. Iñchiñ küme mülen. Ñi chaw ka ñi ñuke fücha ngey. Iñchiw pichi ngen. Kiñe trewa nien iñchiñ, ka kiñe ñarki nien. Ruka mew fentren che müley.

— In my house we live. My father, my mother, my brother and I. My brother and I (we two) go to the sea. We live well. My father and my mother are old. We two are small. We have a dog, and we have a cat. In the house there are many people.

Ñi ñuke kofke dewman. Kofke küme. Iñche ko pütokon ka ilo in. Ñi chaw kütral nien. Kütral eñum. Pun mew iñchiñ dungun ka allkütun. Ñi chaw kuyfi dungu feypi. Iñchiñ allkütun müten. Feychi dungu küme ngey.

— My mother makes bread. The bread is good. I drink water and eat meat. My father has a fire. The fire is warm. At night we talk and listen. My father tells old stories. We only listen. That thing is good.

Antü mew iñchiñ küdawün. Ñi ñuke ruka mew küdawün. Ñi chaw mapu mew küdawün. Iñche skuela mew amun. Skuela mew mapudungun kimeltungey pichi. Doy kimün küpa iñche.

— In the daytime we work. My mother works in the house. My father works on the land. I go to school. At school a little Mapudungun is taught. I want to know more.

Wüle iñchiñ amun waria mew. Waria fücha ngey. Waria mew fentren che müley, welu mapudungun dungungelay. Kom che español dungun. Feychi dungu weda ngey. Welu ruka mew iñchiñ mapudungun dungun müten. Fachantü küme antü.

— Tomorrow we will go to the town. The town is big. In the town there are many people, but Mapudungun is not spoken. Everyone speaks Spanish. That thing is bad. But in the house we speak only Mapudungun. Today is a good day.

5. The direct–inverse system: Mapudungun's signature

This is the feature that makes Mapudungun typologically famous, and it has no English analogue at all. Mapudungun does not choose between subject and object the way English does. It has a person/empathy hierarchy — first and second person outrank third proximate, which outranks third obviative — and the verb marks whether the action runs down that hierarchy (direct) or up it (inverse).⁹¹⁰

Direct, inverse and passive²⁹

When a third person interacts with a first or second person, the hierarchy decides and the speaker has no choice. When two third persons interact, the direct form is used if the agent is topical and the inverse if the patient is.²⁹ Note carefully that the inverse is not a passive — Mapudungun has a separate passive in -nge, and conflating the two is the standard error in popular descriptions.

A terminological warning worth heeding. Analyses of Mapudungun alignment differ, and you will see the language described as ergative in older or looser sources. The direct–inverse framing, following Zúñiga, is the consensus specialist description and is the wording this guide uses.⁹

6. Agglutination, incorporation, and one very long word

Mapudungun is agglutinative and mildly polysynthetic, and head-marking, with productive noun incorporation and root compounding — so a single word can correspond to a whole English sentence.²¹⁰ The example that circulates in the literature is worth walking through because it shows the machinery:

Trarimansunparkelayayngu — 'Those two won't yoke the oxen here!'²

Other things the verb carries: person, number, voice and mood; a two-way indicative tense contrast between present (zero-marked) and future (-(y)a); progressive, resultative and habitual aspect; and an evidential marker of the reportative-mirative kind, alongside a rich set of particles for doubt (chi), surprise (am), regret (nga), certainty (llemay) and more.²

Word order is flexible with a topic-comment tendency: in transitive clauses the agent tends to precede the verb and the object to follow (A–V–O); in intransitives the subject tends to follow the verb (V–S).² Core arguments take no case contrast; relations are carried by the verb and by suffixes like the locative -mew.²

Reader B1 — Mapu ka che — land and people

Constructed for this guide from the Unificado core of the deck below, by someone who does not speak Mapudungun. It is a vocabulary drill in sentence form, not a Mapuche text, and it has not been reviewed by a speaker. Section 10 lists writing by Mapuche authors, which is what you should actually read.

Mapuche pingey che mapu mew mülelu. Mapu ka che kiñe. Chumngelu? Feymew mapu nien che, ka che nien mapu. Kiñe dungun mew mülen ta kimün. Mapudungun kafey feley: mapu ka dungun. Feychi üy küme ngey.

— Mapuche is the name of the people who live in the land. Land and people are one. Why? Because the land has people, and the people have the land. In one word there is knowledge. Mapudungun is the same: land and speech. That name is good.

Kuyfi iñchiñ ñi laku kimün fentren dungu. Fey kimün mawiza, kimün ko, kimün üñüm. Fey kimün antü ka küyen. Fey kimün chem lawen küme ngey. Fachantü doy pichi kimün nien. Welu kimün müley petu.

— Long ago our grandfathers knew many things. They knew the forest, they knew the water, they knew the birds. They knew the sun and the moon. They knew which medicine is good. Today we have less knowledge. But the knowledge is still there.

Ñi laku feypikefuy: mapu ngelay iñchiñ ñi mapu müten. Mapu mülekay kuyfi, ka mülekay wüle. Iñchiñ pichi antü müten mülen mapu mew. Feymew mapu küme elelnge müley. Feychi dungu fücha ngey.

— My grandfather used to say: the land is not only our land. The land was here long ago, and it will be here tomorrow. We are only a short day on the land. So the land must be left well. That thing is big.

Iñche kimeltun küpa. Ñi pichike che mapudungun kimün küpa. Feymew wüle mapudungun mülekay. Fey küme dungu ngey. Kiñe dungun lay, kiñe kimün lay kafey. Feymew iñchiñ kom kelluwün müley.

— I want to teach. I want my children to know Mapudungun. That way, tomorrow Mapudungun will still be here. That is a good thing. When a language dies, a knowledge dies too. So we all need to help one another.

7. The sound system, with its confidence level attached

The segmental description below comes from a caution-tier tertiary source which attributes the modern account to Sadowsky et al., a primary publication this build could not locate. Smeets 2008 and the early phonemic studies were identified but not read in full. Treat what follows as orientation at moderate confidence, not as settled fact.²

Six vowels. The traditional transcription /i ɨ u e o a/ and the modern phonetic one /ɪ ʊ e ɘ o ɐ/ describe the same system differently.²

The consonants include a series that will be new to most learners: a retroflex affricate /ʈʂ/, written tr in Unificado and x in Raguileo; a retroflex approximant /ɻ/, which Sadowsky et al. prefer to treat as a fricative [ʐ]; the interdental series /n̪ t̪ l̪/, which occurs only in some dialects; and /θ/, written d in Unificado.² Aspiration and voicing are not distinctive. Before front vowels /ŋ k ɣ/ are fronted.²

Stress falls predominantly on the penultimate syllable, especially in two- and three-syllable words; in longer words primary stress falls on the second syllable from the left with secondary stress on subsequent even-numbered syllables; in vowel sequences stress goes to the second element — iñchiu [ɪɲtʃiˈu] 'we two', piuke [piˈuke] 'heart'.¹¹

For a Spanish-speaking learner the hard parts are the central vowel /ɘ/, which has no Spanish equivalent, and the retroflex and interdental series. For an English speaker /ɘ/ is easier — it is not far from the vowel in the second syllable of sofa — but the retroflex affricate is not.

8. Dialects, and the Huilliche question

Croese's classification divides Mapudungun into eight dialectal subgroups, numbered I–VIII and clustered into four: north (I–II), central (III–IV), south-central (V–VII) and south (VIII).² Subgroups III–VII are more closely related to each other than to I–II and VIII.

Subgroup VIII is Huilliche, and it is reported not to be mutually intelligible with the others.² That is a substantial claim with real consequences: Huilliche is separately rated severely endangered or moribund.³ The Argentine Neuquén and Río Negro variety resembles the central Chilean group; the Ranquel variety of La Pampa is closer to the northern group.² The eight-group scheme is well documented but routed through a tertiary source in this build, which attributes it to Croese; the primary was not located.

9. Contact: Spanish and, earlier, Quechua

Spanish is the dominant contact language and the medium of ongoing shift; nearly all Mapuche are now bilingual or monolingual in Spanish.² Spanish loan verbs are adapted in a distinctive way — they are borrowed in the third-person singular form, so Spanish puede 'he/she can' becomes Mapudungun pwede 'to be able'.²

Earlier Quechua contact is visible in doublets where a loan sits beside a native word: inti and antü 'sun', killa and küllen 'moon', cachi and chadi 'salt'.² Those pairs are a small window onto pre-Spanish Andean contact.

Reader B2 — Kake dungun — other languages

Constructed for this guide from the Unificado core of the deck below, by someone who does not speak Mapudungun. It is a vocabulary drill in sentence form, not a Mapuche text, and it has not been reviewed by a speaker. Section 10 lists writing by Mapuche authors, which is what you should actually read.

Mapudungun mew müley kake dungun ñi dungu. Kuyfi Quechua che küpay. Feymew antü ka inti kiñe dungu ngey. Küllen ka killa kafey. Chadi ka cachi kafey. Epu dungun müley, welu kiñe dungu müten feypi.

— In Mapudungun there are words from other languages. Long ago Quechua people came. That is why antü and inti are one word. Küllen and killa too. Chadi and cachi too. There are two words, but they say only one thing.

Fachantü Español doy fücha ngey. Kom che Español kimün. Fentren pichike che Español müten kimün, mapudungun kimlay. Feychi dungu weda ngey. Kuyfi skuela mew mapudungun dungungelay, ka pichike che kimeltungelay ñi dungun.

— Today Spanish is bigger. All the people know Spanish. Many children know only Spanish, they do not know Mapudungun. That thing is bad. Long ago Mapudungun was not spoken in the school, and children were not taught their language.

Español dungu kafey müley mapudungun mew. Kiñeke dungu Español mew küpay. Feychi dungu ngelay weda: kom dungun kake dungun mew küpalün niey. Welu kiñe dungun kake dungun mew lalu, feychi dungu weda ngey.

— Spanish words are also in Mapudungun. Some words came from Spanish. That thing is not bad: every language has borrowings from other languages. But when one language dies inside another language, that thing is bad.

Welu kimün müley petu. Kiñeke ruka mew mapudungun dungungey. Kiñeke skuela mew mapudungun kimeltungey. Feymew mapudungun mülekay. Kom che kelluwün müley. Iñche feypin: kimünge, dungunge, ka kimeltunge kake che. Feychi küla dungu müley.

— But the knowledge is still there. In some houses Mapudungun is spoken. In some schools Mapudungun is taught. That way Mapudungun remains. Everyone's help is needed. I said: know it, speak it, and teach it to other people. Those three things are needed.

10. Mapuche voices: what to read, and who to read it from

This is the most important section in the guide, and it comes with a recommendation: read Mapuche authors before you read guides like this one.

In September 2020 the poet and essayist Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpán received Chile's Premio Nacional de Literatura — the national literature prize — becoming the first Mapuche writer to do so.¹² He was born in Quechurewe, in the commune of Cunco in the Araucanía, on 15 February 1952, grew up immersed in Mapuche oral tradition, and writes bilingually in Spanish and Mapudungun, fusing orality and writing; more than fifteen of his works have been translated into some twenty languages, and he also works as an anthologist and as a translator from Spanish into Mapudungun.¹² More than a thousand public figures signed a petition supporting his candidacy.¹²

A bilingual Spanish–Mapudungun poet winning the national prize of the state whose education system suppressed the language is a fact worth sitting with. It is also the single best entry point into written Mapudungun for a learner, because the facing Spanish gives you a crib.

Where to go for real Mapudungun

11. What the sources can and cannot settle

An advanced learner's most useful skill with a language like this is reading the evidence tiers correctly, because the gap between them is wide.

• Specialist and high confidence: the agglutinative and mildly polysynthetic profile, head-marking, dual number, the direct–inverse system, the -nge passive, noun incorporation and the present-versus-future indicative contrast. These are corroborated across Smeets, Zúñiga and Golluscio.⁹¹⁰¹³
• Moderate confidence: the full segment inventory, the aspect paradigm and the complete affix inventory. These route through a tertiary source attributing them to a primary this build could not locate.²
• Documented but routed through tertiary sources: the eight-subgroup dialect classification and the Huilliche mutual-intelligibility claim.²
• Not established here at all: any full verbal paradigm, and any claim about current usage in a specific community.

The research dossier behind this guide states the position plainly: guide content should be developed with speakers, teachers and Mapuche-governed institutions rather than treating external linguistic description as community endorsement. Nothing in this guide has had that review, which is why it is flagged as awaiting it.

Reader C1 — Chumngelu kimeltun — why teaching matters

Constructed for this guide from the Unificado core of the deck below, by someone who does not speak Mapudungun. It is a vocabulary drill in sentence form, not a Mapuche text, and it has not been reviewed by a speaker. Section 10 lists writing by Mapuche authors, which is what you should actually read.

Chumngelu mapudungun kimeltungey skuela mew? Kuyfi ruka mew kimeltungekefuy. Chaw ka ñuke kimeltukefuy ñi pichike che. Fachantü feychi dungu doy pichi ngey. Feymew skuela mew kimeltungey.

— Why is Mapudungun taught in schools? Long ago it was taught in the house. Fathers and mothers taught their children. Today that thing is smaller. So it is taught in the school.

Feymew skuela küme ka weda ngey. Küme, feymew pichike che mapudungun allkütun. Kiñeke pichike che ruka mew mapudungun allkütulay, welu skuela mew allkütun. Feychi dungu küme ngey.

— So the school is good and bad. Good, because there children hear Mapudungun. Some children do not hear Mapudungun in the house, but they hear it in the school. That thing is good.

Welu skuela weda kafey ngey. Weda, feymew ruka mew mapudungun dungungelay. Kiñe dungun ruka mew mülelu doy newen niey. Kiñe dungun skuela mew müten mülelu pichi newen niey. Chumngelu? Feymew skuela mew kiñe antü mew epu sat müten mülen ta dungun.

— But the school is also bad. Bad, because in the house Mapudungun is not spoken. A language that lives in the house has more strength. A language that lives only in the school has little strength. Why? Because in the school the language is there only two hours in a day.

Fentren che feypi: mapudungun kimeltunge skuela mew, ka mapudungun dungunge ruka mew. Epu dungu müley. Kiñe müten müley küme ngelay. Chaw, ñuke, laku, ka kimeltuchefe kom kelluwün müley. Feymew wüle mapudungun mülekay. Iñchiñ kom kelluwün müley.

— Many people say: teach Mapudungun in the school, and also speak Mapudungun in the house. Two things are needed. One alone is not good. Fathers, mothers, grandparents and teachers all need to help. That way, tomorrow Mapudungun will still be here. We all need to help one another.

12. Naming, ownership and the limits of an outside guide

Mapudungun is not an official national language of Chile or Argentina and has historically received little government support.² Since 2013 it has held official status at the communal level in Galvarino.² It is not generally a language of instruction; the PEIB is the principal and limited state policy.¹⁴

Around those bare institutional facts sits a set of live disputes about naming, education models, regional identity and who has standing to speak for the language — disputes this build did not audit and does not attempt to summarise. The absence is deliberate: filling that gap with generic cultural claims would be worse than leaving it visible.

Reader C2 — Iney ñi dungun? — whose language is it?

Constructed for this guide from the Unificado core of the deck below, by someone who does not speak Mapudungun. It is a vocabulary drill in sentence form, not a Mapuche text, and it has not been reviewed by a speaker. Section 10 lists writing by Mapuche authors, which is what you should actually read.

Kiñe ramtun müley: iney ñi dungun ta mapudungun? Feychi ramtun pichi ngelay. Mapudungun mapuche ñi dungun ngey. Welu fentren wigka che mapudungun kimün küpa kafey. Feychi dungu küme ngey? Kiñeke che feypi: may, kom che kimünge. Kiñeke che feypi: kimünge, welu ñi dungun ngelay eymi.

— There is a question: whose language is Mapudungun? That question is not small. Mapudungun is the Mapuche's language. But many non-Mapuche people want to learn Mapudungun too. Is that thing good? Some people say: yes, let everyone learn it. Some people say: learn it, but it is not your language.

Epu dungu kiñe mew müley. Kiñe: kiñe dungun doy che kimlu doy newen niey. Kangelu: kiñe dungun mapuche ñi kimün niey, ka feychi kimün mapuche ñi kimün müten ngey. Wigka che kimünge dungun, welu kimlay kom dungu. Feychi dungu kimünge müley.

— Two things are together in one. First: a language that more people know has more strength. Second: a language holds the Mapuche's knowledge, and that knowledge is the Mapuche's knowledge alone. A non-Mapuche person may learn the language, but does not learn everything. That thing has to be understood.

Iñche wigka ngen ka mapudungun kimlan. Feychi wirin kiñe kimeltuwe müten ngey, ka mapuche ñi dungu ngelay. Feymew feypin: allkütunge mapuche che. Chihuailaf chillkatunge. Ñi dungun eymi ñi dungun ngelay, welu eymi allkütuafuymi ka doy kimafuymi.

— I am not Mapuche and I do not know Mapudungun. This writing is only a teaching tool, and it is not a Mapuche thing. So I said: listen to Mapuche people. Read Chihuailaf. My words are not your words, but you can listen and you can learn more.

Kiñe dungun kimünge, ka feychi dungun ñi che yamünge. Feychi epu dungu kiñe ngey. Kom dungun küme ngey, welu kom dungun kiñe che ñi dungun ngey kafey. Feychi dungu goymanolnge.

— Learn a language, and respect the people of that language. Those two things are one. Every language is good, but every language is also somebody's language. Do not forget that thing.

Glossary — Mapudungun used in the readers that is not on the deck

The readers are built from the Unificado core of the deck, but even very simple connected text needs grammatical machinery the deck does not carry as headwords. Everything used that is not a deck card is listed here, and the build script fails loudly if anything is missing from this list.

The caveat is stronger here than in the other guides in this run. These words were supplied by someone who does not speak Mapudungun, working from reference descriptions. They have not been verified against a dictionary entry one by one, and they have not been seen by a speaker. Treat the glossary as a statement of what needs checking, not as a resource.

Glossary of non-deck Mapudungun used in the readers

13. Where this guide stops

• No full verbal paradigm. The affix inventory and aspect system need Smeets and Zúñiga read directly, which this build did not do.⁹¹³
• No single verified segment inventory. The phonology routes through a tertiary source attributing it to a primary that was not located.²
• No resolution of the deck's mixed orthography. Its Unificado core and its Raguileo harvest sit side by side and are labelled; a future run with an orthography manual should transliterate or split them.
• No community review. Every Mapudungun sentence in the readers was composed by someone who does not speak the language, from a wordlist, and checked only mechanically against that wordlist.
• No treatment of oral-history collections or speaker-authored pedagogy, which are the materials that should anchor a guide like this.

14. Practice

15. Questions people actually ask

16. Where to go next

• Mapudungun vocabulary — the full 407-term deck, with SRS trainerA1–B1 — Unificado core plus a labelled Raguileo harvest. Browsable as a table, with CSV / TSV / Anki / .apkg downloads. Identical to the table on this page. Read its source note before use.
• Elicura Chihuailaf — Premio Nacional de Literatura 2020B1–C2 — The Chilean Ministry of Cultures' announcement. Chihuailaf's bilingual Spanish–Mapudungun poetry is the best entry point into real written Mapudungun for a learner.
• Smeets, A Grammar of Mapuche (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008)C1–C2 — The principal modern reference grammar, with texts and a Mapuche–English dictionary. The right source for any question this guide leaves open.
• Glottolog — Mapudungun (mapu1245)Reference — Classification within the Araucanian family, vitality record and reference list.
• CONADI — Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo IndígenaReference — The Chilean state indigenous development corporation; creator of the Azümchefe alphabet, which is contested.