Languages of Chile Languages of Chile The Republic of Chile is an overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking country, with the exceptions of isolated native and immigrant communities. According to Ethnologue, Chile has nine living languages and seven extinct. Of the 18 million Chileans, some 17 million speak Chilean Spanish as their first language. It is a Spanish dialect which is sometimes difficult for speakers of the Castilian variant of Spanish to understand. It is very similar to Andalusian Spanish in pronunciation but it does have a lot of local slang. There are some 1,700,000 Mapuche living in Chile, of whom 114,000 speak Mapudungun. Huilliche dialect or
Continental Chile Continental Chile Continental Chile is the name given to the Chilean territory located on the continental shelf of South America. This term serves to distinguish the South American area from the insular territories, known as Insular Chile, as from the Antarctic Chile (Chilean Antarctic Territory). The existence of this three areas of effective or claimed Chilean sovereignty is what supports the existing tricontinental principle in this country. In addition, this term specifies the time zones of mainland Chile and the Juan Fernández archipelago and the Desventuradas Islands, located in the UTC-3 time zone, as "continental Chile". Easter Island and the