World Language Map

Where is Mapudungun spoken?

Mapudungun (mapudungun) is an Araucanian language, spoken in Chile and Argentina. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Mapudungun is spoken

Mapudungun is spoken in 2 countries: Chile and Argentina. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Chile1.5%279,970
ArgentinaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Mapudungun is drawn as an area from Figueira 1982 (Argentina). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18614195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Mapudungun.

How many people speak Mapudungun?

Wikidata gives about 300,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Mapudungun sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Mapudungun as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Araucanian
  2. Mapudungun

Related languages

Other languages in the Araucanian group:

More about Mapudungun

Codes: ISO 639-3 arn, Glottolog mapu1245. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Mapudungun

Where is Mapudungun spoken?

Mapudungun is spoken in Chile and Argentina. Unicode CLDR puts it at 1.5% of the population of Chile, which is about 279,970 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Figueira 1982 (Argentina).

How many people speak Mapudungun?

Wikidata gives about 300,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Mapudungun in?

Glottolog places Mapudungun in the Araucanian family.

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