Historical Linguist Ben Molineaux on Documenting the words and sounds of an indigenous American language
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Transcript – Mapping Mapudungun
How can we understand how
language changes over time?
Historical linguists aim to map this language change through time by looking at both the structure and sounds of the language as well as its social environment.
Minority, non-European languages such as indigenous American ones are barely represented in research on language change and limits our understanding of language change as a whole.
Linguistics researcher Dr Ben Molineux is creating the first digitally-based account of change in Mapudungun, the endangered, ancestral language of the Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina.
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