Ideologías lingüísticas acerca del Mapudungun en la urbe chilena: El saber tradicional y su aplicación a la revitalización lingüística

Abstract

Within the framework of linguistic anthropology and its application to language planning, we analyze the social representations about Mapudungun in traditional knowledge (i.e., the language ideologies of the members of indigenous communities), specifically about those aspects concerning the revitalization of this language in Chile. While specialists give a greater importance to corpus planning and to language teaching in schools and workshops, traditional knowledge place emphasis on the cultivation of language status and on the social promotion of their language, as well as on the recovering of traditional spaces of language reproduction (the family and the community). We propose that the revitalization of Mapudungun could benefit from taking into account traditional knowledge, for this would allow to balance the different facets of such a complex enterprise as indigenous language planning.