Araucanian

noun

Arau·​ca·​ni·​an ə-ˌrau̇-ˈkä-nē-ən  ˌa-ˌrȯ-ˈkā- 

variants or less commonly Araucan

ə-ˈrau̇-kən 

1

: a member of a group of Indigenous peoples of south central Chile and adjacent regions of Argentina

2

: the language of the Araucanian people that constitutes an independent language family

Araucanian adjective

Word History

Etymology

Spanish araucano (from Arauco, earlier Rauco, Mapuche "province" of 16th-century Chile + -ano -an entry 1) + -ian

Note: The Spanish ethnonym araucano was first promulgated by the conquistador and poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga in his Renaissance epic based on Spanish-Indigenous conflicts in Chile, La Araucana (first part printed 1569). Ercilla's araucanos are the primordial hostile Indians, by turns savage and noble, and as a literary creation at some remove from ethnohistorical fact. Araucano is transparently derived from Arauco, a toponym first employed in letters of the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, usually in the phrases "la provincia de Arauco" or "el estado de Arauco." Arauco is given neither an exact location nor precise boundaries; Valdivia appears to place it about sixty leagues south of Santiago. The earliest form of the word is Rauco, appearing in an August 11, 1541, act of the Santiago Cabildo, as well as in a letter of Valdivia to Gonzalo Pizarro, of August 20, 1545. Rauco has been explained as a compound of Mapudungun (Mapuche) raq (in the traditional orthography, as in Augusta, Diccionario araucano [1916]; phonetically [ɹɨɣ]), "clay" and ko, "water," putatively referring to a clayey river or other body of water, or to an area with such water—an etymology accepted by the Capuchin missionary and Mapuche scholar Ernesto Wilhelm de Moesbach in Voz de Arauco: Explicación de los nombres indígenas de Chile (Padre Las Casas, 1944), p. 20. The modern town of Arauco in Chile continues the name, though not the original location, of San Felipe de Rauco, an outpost established by Valdivia on the present Golfo de Arauco in 1552. The initial a- of Arauco, the overwhelmingly more common form, has been variously explained; it may simply be a prosthetic vowel to avoid the strongly trilled initial Castilian [r]. The adjectival use of arauco (e.g., indios araucos) was promulgated by Garcilaso de la Vega in his Commentarios reales de los Incas (1609). A thorough discussion of araucano, Arauco, and related matters can be found in Francisco Albizú Labbé, "Nombrar al 'Otro': El texto colonial en la aparición y desaparición de los pueblos indígenas de la América austral," Babel: Littératures plurielles, vol. 13 (2006), pp. 161-92.

First Known Use

1777, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for Araucanian

• romanian
• roumanian
• rumanian
• ukrainian
• cenomanian
• lithuanian
• pennsylvanian
• pomeranian
• subterranean
• mediterranean