A Grammar of Mapuche

Mapuche is the language of the Mapuche (or Araucanians), the indigenous inhabitants of central Chile. It is spoken by about 400,000 people in Chile and 40,000 in Argentina. The relationship with other Amerindian languages has not yet been established. Mapuche is a highly agglutinative language with a complex verbal morphology. This book offers a comprehensive and detailed description of the Mapuche language. It contains a grammar (phonology, morphology and syntax), a collection of texts (stories, conversations and songs) and a Mapuche-English dictionary. The abundance of examples both in the grammar and the dictionary makes for a lively description of the language which will be of interest not only to those who practice Amerindian linguistics but also to those interested in language theory and language typology.