FERNÁNDEZ GARAY, Ana; CENSABELLA, Marisa (eds.) (2009). Estudios fonológicos de continua dialectales: mapuche y wichí. Santa Rosa: Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, 224. Pp. 2

Abstract

This book is a collection of articles dealing with the phonology and dialectology of Wichí (referred to in the past as Mataco) and Mapuzungun (also called Mapudungun or Mapuche), two unrelated Amerindian languages of South America. Published by the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, it is the end result of a three-year project funded by the Argentine government, the purpose of which was to study dialect variation in these languages. All of the authors are specialists in the indigenous languages of Argentina, and all but one are teachers or researchers at Argentine universities or research institutions. Adopting the “dynamic synchrony” approach of the French functionalist school as a methodological-theoretical perspective, the book pretends to give an overall view of the dialectical continua of the Argentine varieties of the languages under study and at the same time to provide some understanding of sociolinguistic variation and ongoing phonological change in both languages. The four articles on Wichí and the single article on Mapuzungun found in this volume, while falling short of constituting a systematic survey, make significant steps toward achieving these difficult and important goals.