Counting in Mapudungun

Language overview

The Mapudungun language (Mapuzugun), also known as Mapudungu, Mapuche, or Araucanian, belongs to the Araucanian family of the South American Indian languages family, while being sometimes considered as a language isolate too. Spoken in south-central Chile and west central Argentina by the Mapuche people, it counts about 200,000 speakers.

Due to lack of data, we can only count accurately up to 9,999 in Mapudungun. Please contact me if you can help me counting up from that limit.

Mapudungun numbering rules

Now that you’ve had a gist of the most useful numbers, let’s move to the writing rules for the tens, the compound numbers, and why not the hundreds, the thousands and beyond (if possible).

• Digits from zero to nine are specific words, namely sero [0], kiñe [1], epu [2], küla [3], meli [4], kechu [5], kayu [6], reqle [7], pura [8], and aylla [9].
• The tens are built by putting the ten multiplier digit before the word for ten (mari), except for ten itself: mari [10], epu mari [20], küla mari [30], meli mari [40], kechu mari [50]…
• The compound numbers are built by following the ten by the unit, separated with a space (e.g.: küla mari kechu [35], reqle mari pura [78]).
• The word for hundred is pataka, one thousand is warangka: both are loan words from Quechua. Compound numbers with hundreds and thousands are built by setting the multiplier, then a space and the scale name, but can be omitted when the multiplier is one (e.g.: (kiñe) pataka [100], epu pataka [200], (kiñe) warangka [1,000], epu warangka mari [2,010]).

Write a number in full in Mapudungun

Let’s move now to the practice of the numbering rules in Mapudungun. Will you guess how to write a number in full? Enter a number and try to write it down in your head, or maybe on a piece of paper, before displaying the result.

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Other supported languages

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