Taking information from the Atlas Linguistico y Etnografico de Chile -a research project in progress- our interest is to demonstrate that at present the geographic distribution of certain words shows the existence of different linguistic strata of various lengths which reveal previous processes of substitution, loss of words whose explanation must be looked for in extra-linguistic facts, among others the geographic scopes of native towns, effects of territorial colonization, culture interaction, impact of mass media communication and some others.