The Corpus of Historical Mapudungun: morpho-phonological parsing and the history of a Native American language

Abstract

The Corpus of Historical Mapudungun (chm), which I present here, is a lemmatised, part-of-speech and grapho-phonologically parsed collection of texts in the ancestral language of the Mapuche people. This paper gives an overview of the corpus materials (spanning 1606 to 1930), their processing and search capabilities. The tei xml tags at the word and morpheme levels are shown to be suitable to account for the abundant agglutinative morphology of the language. The advantages of visualising sound–spelling equivalences across the various spelling systems in the corpus are also emphasised. Some uses and limitations of the corpus are surveyed too, with a particular emphasis on the contribution of typologically diverse languages to understanding language change and the importance of making heritage materials available to native speaker communities for revitalisation purposes.