Introduction

A recent volume published by Lyle Campbell (2018) provides a comprehensive overview of the language isolates in the world and highlights the situation in South America, where such isolates are found to be particularly numerous. This extreme linguistic diversity is unexpected considering the relatively short history of human occupation in the South American subcontinent (possibly less than 15,000 years) and the comparatively high genetic uniformity of its indigenous population. So far, no convincing explanation has been found for the process of diversification underlying this state of affairs. It may appear that, for reasons not yet understood, linguistic differentiation occurred in an accelerated, possibly chaotic manner during early stages of human occupation in the Americas. In more recent time periods accessible to inspection, there are relatively few signs of unusually rapid historical change. The overall pattern is one of gradual diversification similar to that of other, better known linguistic areas in the world, such as, for instance, Europe.

A possible method to obtain a greater understanding of the genesis and past of some of the language isolates in South America may consist in a systematic study of lexical and structural properties that might link each of them to other documented language families and isolates in the subcontinent. In the absence of obvious genealogical connections based on a classic comparative approach, the evidence of prehistoric contact as well as areal features deserves special attention (e.g., Adelaar 2012; Pache 2018a). It appears that some South American language isolates fit more or less well the typological signature of the ethnolinguistic environment in which they are situated, whereas other isolates seem to be typologically alien to the areas in which they continue to exist. Several small families and isolates of the Amazonian region may belong to the former category, whereas notorious typological outliers, such as Mochica in the Andean Pacific area, but also Nambikwaran, Trumai, and Yathê, in the South American lowlands may represent the latter category.

In the present chapter we intend to look at another intractable isolate, namely, Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche (“people of the land”) in southern Chile and Argentina.