Maputhungun, the Mapuche oral tradition

Warning, this post is dangerous, because at the end I’m going to explain a mechanism for “usurping” the Mapuche language.

Letter from the Mapuche people to Bill Gates

The statements by Aucán Huilcamán, Werkén (spokesman) of the Consejo de Todas las Tierras, are unbelievable:

“I am not against the internet, I am defending a collective right that belongs to us as a people, as a culture, and it is the speakers who should make the decision on whether or not we want Mapudungún to be on the Internet.”

(via Quemar Las Naves)

Clearly Mr. Huilcamán is not clear on what Microsoft’s announcement is about; they haven’t even bothered to find out. However clear the history of dispossession of the Mapuche people may be, this attitude is over the top. See the letter they sent to Bill Gates .

What did Microsoft do?

In any case, the Windows operating system has not been rewritten or translated into Mapudungun or Quechua. This is a “localization”, meaning a dictionary of some 29,000 words commonly used in Windows was added.

There is no piracy here. Not even the UN resolutions the Mapuche leaders cite apply in this case, because the dilemmas new technologies pose for the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples have not been settled.

How representative the project is

The translation Microsoft requested was done by the Instituto de Estudios Indígenas at the Universidad de La Frontera (I suggest reading about the orientation and mission of this institute), and carried out by respected researchers (at least 4 of whom are ethnic Mapuche): Eliseo Cañulef, Rosendo Huisca, Flor Caniupil, Graciela Cabral, Esther Chehuan.

The Mapuche oral tradition

A while ago Wenukura explained something important to me:

This language (Mapudungún) is an oral tradition that was never written down, because the idea is that you carry the essentials of a culture with you … if you need to record it, it’s because your spoken word isn’t worth anything and you need something more. It’s interesting that for some time now we’ve been talking about “more audiovisual children”, perhaps to justify the fact that they can’t read, and yet it’s clear that you can think without knowing how to read.

Recipe for appropriating a language

It turns out that, being an oral tradition, the Mapuche language has no “official” writing system. There have been attempts to write it using Spanish graphemes. In fact it’s interesting that several announcements talk about Mapudungún and others about Mapuzungún.

That difference sparked an interesting debate with several former university classmates.

But what if we invented a new way of writing the Mapuche language?

Suppose that in this notation we use a TH to write the sound of the third syllable, and we drop the accented ú from the last syllable; that is, we call the “speech of the land” Maputhungun. And we can go on inventing different notations for the syllables and sounds of this language, so that we can encode them in books, or in any software we may create from now on.

What’s more, we could patent, or register the copyright on, this new notation, which I call Maputhungn.

Would I be usurping the Mapuche people’s language with this construction?

Could Microsoft stop me from creating another notation? Or stop the FLOSS community, or anyone else, from creating whatever notation they want? Can the Mapuche language be privatized by this reasoning, as has been suggested out there?

Is the Mapuche language the intellectual property of the Mapuche people, or of one group, or of nobody?

Can a language be stolen or usurped?

As I said, the reactions are over the top.