Mapudungun Alphabet & Mapuche Symbols

Mapudungun, "speech of the land" (mapu land, dungun speech), is the language of the Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina. It has been written in the Latin alphabet since Spanish missionaries recorded it, but it has no single official spelling. The letters on this page follow the Alfabeto Mapuche Unificado (Unified Mapuche Alphabet, 1986), one of several writing systems. Chilean school programs use Azümchefe. The Unificado letters listed here are: a, d, e, f, g, i, k, l, ḻ, m, n, ṉ, ñ, o, p, r, s, t, ṯ, u, ü, w, y.

Five sounds are written with two letters: ch (as in chaltu may, thank you), ll, ng (as in dungun and Ngillatun, the great community prayer ceremony), sh and tr (as in trutruka, the long horn, and tripantu, year). That is the only reason c and h appear in the grid: Mapudungun has no c or h of their own, only these pairs. There is no b, j, q, v, x or z in this alphabet.

The Unificado uses consistent spellings, but pronunciation varies by dialect. The letters that give Mapudungun its own look are ü, its sixth vowel, and the three underlined letters ḻ ṉ ṯ, its interdental l, n and t; d and g also write sounds of Mapudungun's own, described below.

What ü, ñ, ḻ, ṉ, ṯ, d and g sound like

Ü ü is a sixth vowel of its own, not a u with decoration. It is said with the tongue in the middle of the mouth and the lips spread, between i and u (the sound linguists write [ɨ]). It is everywhere: küme (good), antü (sun), müley (there is), küla (three). Leaving out the dots turns it into a different vowel, so küme written as kume is a misspelling.

Ñ ñ is the ny sound of Spanish, as in ñuke (mother), iñche (I) and peñi, brother, which Chilean Spanish has borrowed as a friendly way to address a Mapuche man.

Ḻ ḻ, Ṉ ṉ, Ṯ ṯ are the interdental l, n and t: the tip of the tongue touches the edge of the upper teeth or sits between the teeth, while plain l, n, t are made just behind them. The line under the letter (Unicode calls it "line below") marks that difference. Because these letters are hard to type, many writers leave the line out in everyday texts and rely on the reader knowing the word.

D d represents an interdental fricative that varies by dialect: it can be voiceless [θ], like the th in English thin, or voiced [ð], like the th in this; Mapudungun is roughly "ma-pu-thu-ngun", with the th varying by dialect. G g on its own is a soft sound made at the back of the mouth, close to the g between vowels in Spanish lago; the ng of English sing is always written ng.

Mapudungun or Mapuzugun: the competing alphabets

Besides the Unificado there are two other alphabets in real use. The Raguileo alphabet, designed by the Mapuche linguist Anselmo Raguileo and published in 1982, aims to represent each phoneme with one letter and uses Latin letters in non-Spanish ways, for example, v for ü, x for tr, z for the th sound and g for ng. In it the language is spelled Mapuzugun, and some Mapuche organisations, such as the Consejo de Todas las Tierras, support it, and it is often valued as the work of a Mapuche speaker.

The Azümchefe alphabet was approved by Chile's indigenous development agency CONADI in the early 2000s and is used in some government and school materials; its own name shows that it keeps ü. So the same language appears as Mapudungun, Mapuzugun, Mapuzungun and Mapudungu, depending on who is writing.

This page gives the Unificado letters because it uses ü and the underlined letters ḻ ṉ ṯ; Raguileo avoids those but still uses ñ. Both use the same punctuation as Chilean Spanish, so questions often start with ¿ and greetings with ¡: ¿Chumleymi?, how are you?

How to type ü, ñ and the underlined ḻ ṉ ṯ

Ü and Ñ are easy everywhere. Windows: hold Alt and type on the number pad ü 0252, Ü 0220, ñ 0241, Ñ 0209, ¿ 0191, ¡ 0161, or use the United States-International layout (" then u for ü, ~ then n for ñ). Mac: Option + U then u for ü, Option + N then n for ñ, or hold the key and pick from the menu. Phones: long-press u and n. A Spanish (Latin America) keyboard has its own ñ key.

Ḻ ḻ, Ṉ ṉ and Ṯ ṯ have no Alt codes and no key on any standard layout. The quickest way is to copy them from this page. In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt + X: 1E3A Ḻ, 1E3B ḻ, 1E48 Ṉ, 1E49 ṉ, 1E6E Ṯ, 1E6F ṯ. On a Mac, switch to the Unicode Hex Input source and hold Option while typing the same codes, or find them in the Character Viewer by searching "line below". In HTML write ḻ for ḻ, ṉ for ṉ and ṯ for ṯ.

Each of these letters can also be built from a plain letter plus the combining macron below, U+0331 (the ̱ in the grid): l followed by it displays as ḻ. The ready-made letters each use one code point; a base letter plus the combining mark is a sequence that apps may handle differently.

Where Mapudungun is spoken, and Mapuche symbols

CLDR estimates around 280,000 Mapudungun speakers in Chile 🇨🇱, mostly in the Araucanía, Biobío, Los Ríos and Los Lagos regions and in Santiago, where many Mapuche families have lived for generations. It is also spoken across the Andes in Argentina 🇦🇷, above all in Neuquén and Río Negro. Most speakers also speak Spanish, and the language is taught in intercultural schools in both countries. In both, prices are written with the peso sign $. See the Chile and Argentina collections for their flags, emoji and Spanish letters, and the Spanish collection for á é í ó ú.

Mapudungun is usually treated as a language isolate, unrelated to Spanish or to the Quechua and Aymara of the Andes further north; some linguists group it with Huilliche, spoken further south, as a small Araucanian family.

There are no Mapuche emoji yet and no emoji of the Mapuche flag, the Wenufoye, adopted in 1992. People paste the nearest characters instead: ✴️ or ✷ for the wüñelfe (also written guñelve), the eight-pointed morning star woven into textiles and worked in silver jewellery; 🪘 for the kultrun, the drum of the machi, the healer; 🌲 for the pewen, the araucaria tree whose seeds feed the Pewenche; 🏑 for palin, the stick-and-ball game often compared to hockey; and 🌄 for We Tripantu, the new year welcomed at dawn at the winter solstice in June.