Language ideologies of emerging institutional frameworks of Mapudungun revitalization in contemporary Chile: nation, Facebook, and the moon of Pandora

Abstract

Abstract This article is a succinct approach to Mapudungun language ideologies and their development within the political and economic context of 21st century Chile. Social media have empowered Mapudungun language activists and intellectuals and helped them create digital communities, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, from which they establish and promote language policies, defined by themselves. Among the most relevant language ideologies found in the corpus, there is a representation of Indigenous languages as sacred, or untouchable, often implying an essential connection between Indigenous cultures and the natural or spiritual world. This representation (called “cosmovisionism” by activists) tends to contradict modernizing language ideologies that circulate in emerging Mapudungun language planning, mainly due to the influence of Basque and Catalan models based on the notion of language normalization, actively promoted in Chile by agents from those domains. Modernizing visions of Mapudungun tend to be linked to a nationalist political project that demands a solid connection between land, people, history, cultural identity, and language. This leads to ideological tensions between the urgency to anonymize and the need to depoliticize the language, both simultaneously considered fundamental to secure Mapudungun’s expansion.