Despite the fact that several American countries have made various indigenous languages official, the majority of them keeps declining. This paper holds that this is due to the purely formal role that these official languages have and the fact that these languages are not educational languages. The experience shows that the revitalization of a language is only possible if it has the status of official and is an educational language in a defined political-territorial setting. Thus, the revitalization of the mapuzugun is connected with the Mapuche nation self-government rights in Wallmapu, the Mapuche country. The situation of the mapuzugun is compared with processes of language revitalization in development, in particular with the euskera.