Abstract

"This article determines the phonemic status of the phone , based on its distribution. The language informants are Mapudungun native speakers, selected according to their competence in the vernacular. They belong to 10 different areas of Alto Bío-Bío. The data collection was done by eliciting words from a lexical list. The framework for data analysis considers the tradition of studies on Mapuche in Chile, from Lenz to the last three years studies. Also, the distribution al analysis by Pike (1947) and Burquest (2009), with the contributions of Salas and Poblete (1997) and Salamanca et al (2011). After the analysis was done, it was concluded that the phone has the status of phoneme (/y/), and its allophonic realizations are the segments . It is also concluded that there is no major difference in this segment behavior in the areas of Queuco and Biobio, or in masculine and feminine genders."