Guarani Language

It is one of the official languages of Paraguay (along with Spanish), where it is spoken by the majority of the population, and where half of the rural population are monolingual speakers of the language.

Guarani
Paraguayan Guarani
avañe'ẽ
Pronunciation	[ʔãʋãɲẽˈʔẽ]
Native to	Paraguay
Ethnicity	Guaraní
Native speakers	6.5 million (2020)
Language family	Tupian Tupi–Guarani Guarani (I) Guaraní Guarani
Dialects	Jopará Correntino Simba Chawuncu Tsiripá Mbyá
Writing system	Guarani alphabet (Latin script)
Official status
Official language in	Paraguay
Regulated by	Academia de la Lengua Guaraní (Avañe'ẽ Rerekuapavẽ)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	gn
ISO 639-2	grn
ISO 639-3	gug
Glottolog	para1311
Linguasphere	88-AAI-f
Guarani-speaking world
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Variants of the language are spoken by communities in neighboring countries including parts of northeastern Argentina, southeastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil, and is a second official language of the Argentine province of Corrientes since 2004. Guarani is also one of the three official languages of Mercosur, alongside Spanish and Portuguese.

Guarani is the most widely spoken Native American language and remains commonly used among the Paraguayan people and neighboring communities. This is unique among American languages; language shift towards European colonial languages (in this case, the other official language of Spanish) has otherwise been a nearly universal phenomenon in the Western Hemisphere, but Paraguayans have maintained their traditional language at the same time as Spanish has been adopted.

Jesuit priest Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, who in 1639 published the first written grammar of Guarani in a book called Tesoro de la lengua guaraní (Treasure/Thesaurus of the Guarani Language), described it as a language "so copious and elegant that it can compete with the most famous [of languages]".

The name "Guarani" is generally used for the official language of Paraguay. However, this is part of a dialect chain, most of whose components are also often called Guarani.

While Guarani, in its Classical form, was the only language spoken in the expansive missionary territories, Paraguayan Guarani has its roots outside of the Jesuit Reductions.

Modern scholarship has shown that Guarani was always the primary language of colonial Paraguay, both inside and outside the reductions. Following the expulsion of the Jesuits in the 18th century, the residents of the reductions gradually migrated north and west towards Asunción, a demographic shift that brought about a decidedly one-sided shift away from the Jesuit dialect that the missionaries had curated in the southern and eastern territories of the colony.

By and large, the Guarani of the Jesuits shied away from direct phonological loans from Spanish. Instead, the missionaries relied on the agglutinative nature of the language to formulate new precise translations or calque terms from Guarani morphemes. This process often led the Jesuits to employ complicated, highly synthetic terms to convey European concepts. By contrast, the Guarani spoken outside of the missions was characterized by a free, unregulated flow of Hispanicisms; frequently, Spanish words and phrases were simply incorporated into Guarani with minimal phonological adaptation.

A good example of that phenomenon is found in the word "communion". The Jesuits, using their agglutinative strategy, rendered this word "Tupârahava", a calque based on the word "Tupâ", meaning God. In modern Paraguayan Guarani, the same word is rendered "komuño".

Following the out-migration from the reductions, these two distinct dialects of Guarani came into extensive contact for the first time. The vast majority of speakers abandoned the less colloquial, highly regulated Jesuit variant in favor of the variety that evolved from actual use by speakers in Paraguay. This contemporary form of spoken Guarani is known as Jopará, meaning "mixture" in Guarani.

Political status

 

Widely spoken, Paraguayan Guarani has nevertheless been repressed by Paraguayan governments throughout most of its history since independence. It was prohibited in state schools for over 100 years. However, populists often used pride in the language to excite nationalistic fervor and promote a narrative of social unity.

During the autocratic regime of Alfredo Stroessner, his Colorado Party used the language to appeal to common Paraguayans although Stroessner himself never gave an address in Guarani. Upon the advent of Paraguayan democracy in 1992, Guarani was established in the new constitution as a language equal to Spanish.

Jopará, the mixture of Spanish and Guarani, is spoken by an estimated 90% of the population of Paraguay. Code-switching between the two languages takes place on a spectrum in which more Spanish is used for official and business-related matters, and more Guarani is used in art and in everyday life.

Guarani is also an official language of Bolivia and of Corrientes Province in Argentina.

 

Guarani became a written language relatively recently. Its modern alphabet is basically a subset of the Latin script (with "J", "K" and "Y" but not "W"), complemented with two diacritics and six digraphs. Its orthography is largely phonemic, with letter values mostly similar to those of Spanish. The tilde is used with many letters that are considered part of the alphabet. In the case of Ñ/ñ, it differentiates the palatal nasal from the alveolar nasal (as in Spanish), whereas it marks stressed nasalisation when used over a vowel (as in Portuguese): ã, ẽ, ĩ, õ, ũ, ỹ. (Nasal vowels have been written with several other diacritics: ä, ā, â, ã.) The tilde also marks nasality in the case of G̃/g̃, used to represent the nasalized velar approximant by combining the velar approximant G with the nasalising tilde. The letter G̃/g̃, which is unique to this language, was introduced into the orthography relatively recently during the mid-20th century and there is disagreement over its use. It is not a precomposed character in Unicode, which can cause typographic inconveniences – such as needing to press "delete" twice in some setups – or imperfect rendering when using computers and fonts that do not properly support the complex layout feature of glyph composition.

Only stressed nasal vowels are written as nasal. If an oral vowel is stressed, and it is not the final syllable, it is marked with an acute accent: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý. That is, stress falls on the vowel marked as nasalized, if any, else on the accent-marked syllable, and if neither appears, then on the final syllable.

For blind people there is also a Guarani Braille.

Guarani syllables consist of a consonant plus a vowel or a vowel alone; syllables ending in a consonant or two or more consonants together do not occur. This is represented as (C)V.

In the below table, the IPA value is shown. The orthography is shown in angle brackets below, if different.

Consonants

The voiced consonants have oral allophones (left) before oral vowels, and nasal allophones (right) before nasal vowels. The oral allophones of the voiced stops are prenasalized.

There is also a sequence /ⁿt/ (written ⟨nt⟩). A trill /r/ (written ⟨rr⟩), and the consonants /l/, /f/, and /j/ (written ⟨ll⟩) are not native to Guarani, but come from Spanish.

Oral /ᵈj/ is often pronounced [dʒ], [ɟ], [ʒ], [j], depending on the dialect, but the nasal allophone is always [ɲ].

The dorsal fricative is in free variation between [x] and [h].

⟨g⟩, ⟨gu⟩ are approximants, not fricatives, but are sometimes transcribed [ɣ], [ɣʷ], as is conventional for Spanish. ⟨gu⟩ is also transcribed [ɰʷ], which is essentially identical to [w].

All syllables are open, viz. CV or V, ending in a vowel.

Glottal stop

The glottal stop, called puso in Guarani, is only written between vowels, but occurs phonetically before vowel-initial words. Because of this, some words have several glottal stops near each other that consequently undergo a number of different dissimilation techniques. For example, "I drink water" 'a'y'u is pronounced hay'u. This suggests that irregularity in verb forms derives from regular sound change processes in the history of Guarani. There also seems to be some degree of variation between how much the glottal stop is dropped (for example aru'uka > aruuka > aruka for "I bring"). It is possible that word-internal glottal stops may have been retained from fossilized compounds where the second component was a vowel-initial (and therefore glottal stop–initial) root.

Vowels

/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ correspond more or less to the Spanish and IPA equivalents, although sometimes the open-mid allophones [ɛ], [ɔ] are used more frequently. The grapheme ⟨y⟩ represents the vowel /ɨ/ (as in Polish). Considering nasality, the vowel system is perfectly symmetrical, each oral vowel having its nasal counterpart (most systems with nasals have fewer nasals than orals).

Nasal harmony

Guarani displays an unusual degree of nasal harmony. A nasal syllable consists of a nasal vowel, and if the consonant is voiced, it takes its nasal allophone. If a stressed syllable is nasal, the nasality spreads in both directions until it bumps up against a stressed syllable that is oral. This includes affixes, postpositions, and compounding. Voiceless consonants do not have nasal allophones, but they do not interrupt the spread of nasality.

For example,

/ⁿdo+ɾoi+ⁿduˈpã+i/ → [nõɾ̃õĩnũˈpãĩ]
/ro+ᵐbo+poˈrã/ → [ɾ̃õmõpõˈɾ̃ã]

However, a second stressed syllable, with an oral vowel, will not become nasalized:

/iᵈjaˈkãɾaˈku/ → [ʔĩɲãˈkãɾ̃ãˈku]
/aˈkãɾaˈwe/ → [ʔãˈkãɾ̃ãˈwe]

That is, for a word with a single stressed vowel, all voiced segments will be either oral or nasal, while voiceless consonants are unaffected, as in oral /ᵐbotɨ/ vs nasal /mõtɨ̃/.

Guarani is a highly agglutinative language, often classified as polysynthetic. It is a fluid-S type active language, and it has been classified as a 6th class language in Milewski's typology. It uses subject–verb–object (SVO) word order usually, but object–verb when the subject is not specified.

The language lacks gender and has no native definite article but, due to influence from Spanish, la is used as a definite article for singular reference and lo for plural reference. These are not found in Classical Guarani (Guaraniete).

Nouns

Guarani exhibits nominal tense: past, expressed with -kue, and future, expressed with -rã. For example, tetã ruvichakue translates to "ex-president" while tetã ruvicharã translates to "president-elect." The past morpheme -kue is often translated as "ex-", "former", "abandoned", "what was once", or "one-time". These morphemes can even be combined to express the idea of something that was going to be but did not end up happening. So for example, pa'irãgue is "a person who studied to be a priest but didn't actually finish", or rather, "the ex-future priest". Some nouns use -re instead of -kue and others use -guã instead of -rã.

Pronouns

Guarani distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive pronouns of the first person plural.