Prominent Features Of Chedungun’ Segmental Phonology Spoken By Alto Bío-Bío Students

Abstract

This paper presents a description of the Mapudungun’s phonological system spoken by Pehuenche students from the 8th Bío-Bío region. This phonological system is compared to the one that is present in the phonemic descriptions that exist in Mapudungun in general and in the Pehuenche variant in particular. The participants correspond to a group of 20 seventh and eighth graders whose age ranges between 12 and 15, from rural schools that are part of the Programa de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (PEIB) in Alto Bío-Bío. For the phonetic and phonological data, a 64 lexical item list was gathered and participants were requested to tell a short story in Mapudungun. The reference framework selected for the data analysis was the North American descriptive method. This paper ends up with the prominent aspects of the described phonology, an evaluation of the utilized instruments and two projections based on the conducted research.