Towards a Corpus of Historical Mapudungun

Minority, non-European languages – such as indigenous American ones – are critically underrepresented in the literature on historical linguistics. This not only narrows our view of the historical interaction of peoples and languages pre- and post-dating European expansion, but also limits our understanding of linguistic change as a whole. In the absence of the hundreds of years of philological study available for Old World languages, digital methods emerge as ideal means for systematically compiling and exploring the available data for language change in the New World.

This talk presents an overview of the plans and progress in the compilation of the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun (CHM), currently under development at the Angus McIntoshCentre for Historical Linguistics, Edinburgh. The resource will document and propose analyses for the diachrony of the word- and sound-structure of Mapudungun, the ancestrallanguage of the Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina. While present-day varieties of the language are mostly well described and remain in use, there is very little explicit work on their history, despite 400 years of textual evidence. Building the CHM will requirethe compilation, tagging, and parsing of the main body of early Mapudungun texts into unitsof meaning (morphemes) and sound (phones), effectively helping us write the morphological and phonological history of the language from the bottom up. Such research represents aqualitative leap in the study of Mapudungun, while at the same time laying the groundworkfor historical corpus methods to be applied to minority languages more broadly.The presentation will give an overview of Mapudungun and its history, highlighting some typologically interesting features (high morpheme-to-word ratio, agglutination, fricative instability) and how they present challenges and possibilities to a corpus-based approach. Some prospects for the use of the corpus in both academic and non-academic settings are proposed, as well as list of desiderata for future developments in historical corpora.