The southernmost regions of South America harbor some of the earliest evidence of human presence in the Americas. However, connections with the rest of the continent and the contextualization of present-day indigenous ancestries remain poorly resolved. In this study, we analyze the genetic ancestry of one of the largest indigenous groups in South America: the Mapuche. We generate genome-wide data from 64 partic-ipants from three Mapuche populations in Southern Chile: Pehuenche, Lafkenche, and Huilliche. Broadly, we describe three main ancestry blocks with a common origin, which characterize the Southern Cone, the Cen-tral Andes, and Amazonia. Within the Southern Cone, ancestors of the Mapuche lineages differentiated from those of the Far South during the Middle Holocene and did not experience further migration waves from the north. We find that the deep genetic split between the Central and Southern Andes is followed by instances of gene flow, which may have accompanied the southward spread of cultural traits from the Central Andes, including crops and loanwords from Quechua into Mapudungun (the language of the Mapuche). Finally, we report close genetic relatedness between the three populations analyzed, with the Huilliche characterized additionally by intense recent exchanges with the Far South. Our findings add new perspectives on the genetic (pre)history of South America, from the first settlement through to the present-day indigenous presence. Follow-up fieldwork took these results back to the indigenous communities to contextualize the genetic narrative alongside indigenous knowledge and perspectives.

This chapter explores sociophonetic research on the Spanish language. After a quantitative review of the field by country, it examines early sociophonetic research (1890s–1980s) with a focus on its origins, influences, and methods. It then examines Spanish-language sociophonetics as a whole in terms of its central research questions, key theories and frameworks, and methods and approaches. It then presents a sociophonetic study of Chilean Spanish vowels, before closing with some reflections on the future of the discipline.

This paper presents the Sociolinguistic Speech Corpus of Chilean Spanish (COSCACH) v1.0, a 9.3-million-word corpus containing transcribed, lemmatized and morphologically tagged text, audio recordings and videos from 1,237 L1 speakers of Chilean Spanish, as well as a control sample of 21 non-Chilean L1 Spanish speakers. The COSCACH is the first freely available corpus of spoken Chilean Spanish of substantial size, as well as one of the largest speech corpora of any variety of Spanish. Following a review of other Chilean speech corpora, I describe how the COSCACH was constructed, covering corpus design, speaker recruitment and metadata collection, speech elicitation and recording, transcription, lemmatization and morphological tagging, and corpus compilation. I thereby aim to provide a blueprint for creating modern, large-scale speech corpora suitable for phonetic, sociophonetic and sociolinguistic research, in addition to traditional inquiry into semantics, lexis, grammar, pragmatics and discourse.

This paper presents the Sociolinguistic Speech Corpus of Chilean Spanish (COSCACH) v1.0, a 9.3-million-word corpus containing transcribed, lemmatized and morphologically tagged text, audio recordings and videos from 1,237 L1 speakers of Chilean Spanish, as well as a control sample of 21 non-Chilean L1 Spanish speakers. The COSCACH is the first freely available corpus of spoken Chilean Spanish of substantial size, as well as one of the largest speech corpora of any variety of Spanish. Following a review of other Chilean speech corpora, I describe how the COSCACH was constructed, covering corpus design, speaker recruitment and metadata collection, speech elicitation and recording, transcription, lemmatization and morphological tagging, and corpus compilation. I thereby aim to provide a blueprint for creating modern, large-scale speech corpora suitable for phonetic, sociophonetic and sociolinguistic research, in addition to traditional inquiry into semantics, lexis, grammar, pragmatics and discourse.

El presente articulo examina la posible influencia del mapudungun, la lengua indigena mas hablada de Chile, en el castellano chileno, desde dos perspectivas. En primer lugar, reexaminamos la hipotesis que el linguista aleman Rodolfo Lenz desarrollo a fines del siglo XIX. Esta postula que una serie de 10 rasgos foneticos y fonologicos del castellano de Chile provendrian del mapudungun. Analizamos cada uno de estos rasgos, revisando criticamente los argumentos de Lenz y de su principal detractor, el filologo peninsular Amado Alonso, a la luz de los conocimientos contemporaneos de la linguistica, la genetica, la demografia y otras disciplinas. Concluimos que es improbable o imposible que tres de los rasgos se hayan originado en el mapudungun; que tres otros rasgos probablemente si fueron transferidos desde el mapudungun al castellano de Chile; y que la falta de estudios relevantes impide llegar a una conclusion fundada en los demas casos. En segundo lugar, presentamos los resultados de un estudio que analiza las vocales del castellano de Chile, comparandolas con las vocales del mapudungun y las de otras variedades del castellano. Las vocales, que la hipotesis de Lenz no contempla, se analizan en terminos de su ubicacion (timbre o cualidad) y del tamano del sistema que conforman en el espacio acustico. Los resultados indican que las vocales del castellano de Chile y las del mapudungun son fuertemente medio-centralizadas y que ocupan una proporcion menor del espacio acustico, mientras que las vocales de las demas variedades del castellano son casi sin excepcion perifericas y ocupan la mayor parte del espacio acustico disponible. Concluimos que es probable que el sistema vocalico del castellano chileno se haya reorganizado bajo la influencia del mapudungun.

This chapter examines the Spanish spoken in Santiago, Chile, and some of the effects that globalization, social dynamics, migration, and ethnicity have had on it. It contextualizes Santiago's place on the national and global stage and then detail the particularizing features of Chilean Spanish, with emphasis on the high degree of sociolinguistic variation it manifests. The chapter explores the attitudes of Santiago's inhabitants toward their own and other varieties of Spanish, toward English, and toward concepts of linguistic correctness, before reviewing a series of key language issues. It traces the history of the Mapuches, with emphasis on their migratory movements to Santiago, and then move on to the main focus. The chapter reviews the main features of the Spanish of Mapudungun–Spanish bilinguals and then present the results of an original study of two of these features in Mapuches who speak only Spanish.

A typologically-anomalous whistled /s/ with a center of gravity (CoG) and/or spectral peak below 4.1 kHz has been described in a handful of languages. Additionally, in southern Chilean Spanish an ultrahigh-frequency whistled /s/ (UHF [s]͎) with a CoG over 10 kHz was recently reported. This paper examines the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and gender, as well as phonological context, on the prevalence and spectral moments of the Chilean UHF [s]͎. 40 speakers from five SESs were analyzed and mixed-effects linear regression analyses were performed. The prevalence of UHF [s]͎ shows a significant direct correlation with both female gender and lower socioeconomic status. Its kurtosis is stable across speaker groups. Its CoG increases with female gender and middle SES, while decreasing in the highest SES. Its negative skewness, which is characteristic of this phone, is favored by female gender and non-upper SES. Lower standard deviation, also characteristic, is favored by female gender. The results suggest that UHF [s]͎ operates as a sociolinguistic indicator.

This paper explores the sociophonetic variation of the consonants of Chilean Spanish. It analyzes the socially-indexed allophones of /t???/, /t???/, /r/, /?/, /?/, /s/, /d?/, /?/, /f/, /l/ and /b/, and concludes that in the young generation, speakers of all social classes are adopting prestige allophones of /t???/ on a massive scale; that a process of sociolect leveling is affecting /t???/, /r/, /?/ and /?/, possibly under the influence of an exonorm in the case of /t???/ and /r/; that /s/ has developed new stigmatized allophones due to the operation of covert prestige; and that certain allophones of /s/ and /d?/ which were socially unmarked in the past are becoming stigmatized, likely as a result of hypercorrective use. It further concludes that /?/ is for all intents and purposes extinct, and that the stigmatized allophones of /f/ and /l/, as well as a non-stigmatized allophone of /b/, have been largely abandoned.

This paper explores the sociophonetic variation of the consonants of Chilean Spanish. It analyzes the socially indexed allophones of /t integral/, /t(f)/, /r/, /f/, /j/, /s/, /d/, /lambda/, /f/, /l/and /b/, and concludes that in the young generation, speakers of all social classes are adopting prestige allophones of /t integral/ on a massive scale; that a process of sociolect leveling is affecting /t(f)/, /r/, /f/ and /j/, possibly under the influence of an exonorm in the case of /t(f)/and /r/; that /s/ has developed new stigmatized allophones due to the operation of covert prestige; and that certain allophones of /s/and /d/ which were socially unmarked in the past are becoming stigmatized, likely as a result of hypercorrective use by low-prestige groups. It further concludes that /lambda/ is for all intents and purposes extinct, and that the stigmatized allophones of /f/ and /l/, as well as a non-stigmatized allophone of /b/, have been largely abandoned.

La falta de concordancia entre el clítico dativo le y el objeto indirecto (OI) plural, atestiguada tempranamente en español, sigue vigente. Las hipótesis que buscan explicarla apelan a la fonología, la economía morfosintáctica y la pragmática. Con el fin de comparar las realizaciones de le invariable y les concordante con OI en el español escrito de Chile, se analiza un corpus de 463 millones de palabras, considerando el orden de elementos en la oración y la distribución del fenómeno en variedades textuales. El estudio muestra que la frecuencia de le invariable depende tanto de la posición del OI como de propiedades de los contextos discursivos en que aparece. Se concluye que, de las tres hipótesis propuestas, solo la pragmática es compatible con los resultados.

Mapudungun (/mɐ ̝pʊðʊˈŋʊn/ or /mɐ ̝pʊθʊˈŋʊn/; also known as ‘Mapudungu’, ‘Mapuzugun’, ‘Mapuche’, ‘Mapuchedungun’, ‘Chedungun’ and ‘Araucanian’ or ‘Araucano’ (the latter two being archaic)) is a language isolate spoken actively by approximately 144,000 people in Chile (Z ⁄ uñiga 2007), as well as by some 8,400 people in Argentina (Instituto Nacional de Estad ⁄ ısticas y Censos 2005), virtually all of whom are bilingual in Spanish. Its ISO 639–3 code is arn. Mapudungun can be divided into three broad dialect groups: north, central and south. These are further divided into eight sub-groups: I and II (northern group), III–VII (central group) and VIII (southern group). These dialects share a high degree of mutual intelligibility, which decreases only between I and VIII (Croese 1980). The Mapudungun spoken in the Argentinean provinces of Neuqu ⁄ en and R ⁄ ıo Negro is similar to that of the central dialect group in Chile, while the Ranquel (Rankülche) variety spoken in the Argentinean province of La Pampa is closer to the northern dialect group (Golluscio 2009). Mapudungun is not an official language of Chile or Argentina, and has received virtually no government support throughout its history. It is not used as a language of instruction in either country’s educational system (Salas 1992), and no university trains teachers of the language. At present, a small number of schools may impart Mapudungun in optional second-language classes (spoken greetings and phrases only; neither true oral language competency nor literacy are taught) to Mapuche students as part of the Chilean government’s Bilingual Intercultural Education Program (Fern ⁄ andez Droguett 2005). However, the use of this educational strategy

Based on a review of classic indices in lexical statistics (Laws of Estoup-Zipf-Mandelbrot), two linguistic indices are proposed in order to contribute new data in the description of specialized texts. A case is presented in which these indices are applied to a representative, multidisciplinary corpus of research articles in Spanish that is contrasted with seven other corpora serving as a control group. Although, from a general point of view the proposed indices present stable behaviour in different registers, implemented specifically, the proposed indices allow the distinction between high and low specialized registers and reveal the disciplinary variation of the corpora analyzed.

The present article proposes a set of principles to guide the process of defining the segmental phonetic inventory of contemporary Chilean Spanish. It presents a provisional phonetic inventory of consonants based on the above-mentioned principles, using the Spanish spoken in the province of Concepcion (Chile) as its point of reference. In addition, it presents a system for the phonetic representation of this and future inventories (IPA-CL) and proposes a research program with the goal of establishing a definitive phonetic inventory of contemporary Chilean Spanish. The long-term objective of this article is to spur research on both the theoretical and methodological issues presented here, and the selection and characterization of the phones of the provisional inventory.

El presente artículo propone un conjunto de principios orientadores para la elaboración del inventario fonético segmental del castellano hablado actualmente en Chile. Se presenta un inventario fonético provisorio de las consonantes basado en los principios aquí explicitados, el cual tiene como punto de referencia el castellano hablado hoy en la provincia de Concepción (Chile). Se presenta, además, un sistema de representación fonética (AFi-CL) para este y futuros inventarios, y se propone un programa de investigación cuyo objetivo es la elaboración del inventario fonético definitivo y de consenso del español de Chile contemporáneo. el objetivo final del artículo es motivar la realización de un caudal de trabajos que investiguen tanto los supuestos teórico-metodológicos contenidos en la propuesta como la selección y caracterización de los fonos del inventario provisorio.

Resumen es: El presente trabajo investiga un tipo de construccion poco estudiado en espanol: caso + noMinal, frecuente en el discurso periodistico chileno refer...

The present investigation proposes that the nominalization index (the ratio of nouns to verbs in a given text) successfully predicts the academic-scientific character of a text. The results of a computer-assisted analysis of a 12.7 million word corpus show that this index is sensitive to the opposition between scientific/academic texts and letters to the editor/journalistic texts. It is likewise sensitive to the differences between applied sciences, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities texts, although there is a certain amount of overlap between these last two. When contrasting expert and novice texts, the index is only sensitive in the case of applied and natural sciences. It is suggested that the greater relative occurrence of nouns could be related to the construction of an object-centric depersonalized discourse in which the vicissitudes of actors' mental processes are believed to be irrelevant in the interpretation of discourse-coherence relationships.