Towards a Corpus of Historical Mapudungun

Minority, non-European languages – such as indigenous American ones – are critically underrepresented in the literature on language change. This not only narrows our view of the historical interaction of peoples and languages predating 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 for the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun (CHM), currently under development at the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguis- tics, at Edinburgh. It is, to our knowledge, the first taylor-made digital resource explicitly designed for exploring the historical development of a language of the Americas. It will document and propose analyses for the diachrony of the sound- and word-structure of Ma- pudungun, the ancestral language of the Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina. It will require the compilation, tagging, and parsing of the main body of early Mapudungun texts into units of meaning (morphemes) and sound (phones). This body of data will be ac- companied by a ‘repository of sound changes’ accounting for the links between individual related forms over time, effectively writing the morphological and phonological history of the language from the bottom up. Such research represents a qualitative leap in the study of Mapudungun, while at the same time laying the groundwork for historical corpus methods to be applied to minority languages more broadly.