Abstract

This study focuses on the mid-central vowel /ə/ in Mapudungun, the largest Amerindian language spoken in Chile. Although most studies agree that phonologically Mapudungun has 6 vowels and that /ə/ has two allophones, [ɯ] and [ə], there is no consensus on which variables are better at explaining /ə/’s variability, its underlying representation, or even whether the existence of both [ɯ] and [ə] are justified. To investigate this, statistical models were built to evaluate the effects of stress, position of vowel in word, and phonetic context on normalized F1, F2 and F3 values from 791 tokens of /ə/. While the acoustic data shows that there is considerable overlap of the vowel space of /ə/ and that of other vowels, analyses showed that, contrary to expectations, there is not sufficient evidence to justify the existence of two allophones, which we interpret as indicative of the loss of vitality of /ə/.