Guarani () is a Tupian language belonging to the Tupi–Guarani branch of South America. It is one of the two 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 is one of the most widely spoken Native American languages 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 while also adopting Spanish. In South America, the indigenous language that is most widely spoken amongst non-indigenous communities is Guaraní. South America is home to more than 280,000 Guaraní people, 51,000 of whom reside in Brazil. The Guaraní people inhabit regions in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, as well as Argentina. There are more than four million speakers of Guaraní across these regions.
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.
Geographical distribution Variants of the language are spoken by communities in neighboring countries including parts of northeastern Argentina, southeastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil. It is the second official language of the Argentine province of Corrientes since 2004 and the Brazilian city of Tacuru since 2010. Guarani is also one of the three official languages of Mercosur, alongside Spanish and Portuguese.
Status The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) classified Guaraní's language vitality as "vulnerable". UNESCO's definition of "vulnerable" is meant to highlight that although the majority of Guaraní children can speak Guaraní, the use of the language is restricted to particular contexts (e.g., familial settings). In 2002, 28% of Paraguayans were monolingual Guaraní speakers, but by 2022 only 12% were. On the other hand, Spanish monolingualism did not rise over the same period, indicating the continued vivacity of Guaraní in a multilingual population.
Although the Guaraní language may only be classified as "vulnerable," there are other languages within the Tupí-Guaraní branch that are classified as "extinct" and "critically endangered" (e.g., Amanayé and Anambé respectively).
Documentation According to Silvetti and Silvestri (2015), Guaraní only came to be a written language following the arrival of the Jesuits. Silvetti and Silvestri propound that "it was the Jesuits who gave it a grammar and a syntax and made it into one of the ‘lenguas generales’ used for the evangelization of the natives".
In light of this, important literary works on Guaraní linguistics were produced by three Jesuits, namely: (i) Jesuit Joseph de Anchieta; (ii) Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya; and lastly, (iii) Jesuit Alonso de Aragona. The first Guaraní grammar written was that of Jesuit Joseph de Anchieta (1595). Ringmacher contends, however, that Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's Arte de la lengua Guaraní (1640), a documentation of Guaraní grammar, served as a significant point of reference and departure for all proceeding grammatical works concerning the Guaraní language. Montoya's analysis of the Guaraní morphology and syntax stands accurate until this day. Montoya also produced a Guaraní dictionary known as Tesoro de la Lengua Guaraní (1639). In this work, he not only created the first dictionary of this kind, but also provided examples of contexts in which to use the various words he documented. Lastly, Jesuit Alonso de Aragona produced a pedagogical grammar that was completed in 1629, but only printed in 1979. The intention of Aragona's work was to help those seeking ways to learn Guaraní.
The extensive research conducted as well as the expansive reach of the Guaraní language across Latin America has granted it an important position in the urban landscape. In other words, Guaraní's official status in Paraguay combined with research studies that have followed has allowed for recent projects of standardization.
History 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 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 "", a calque based on the word "", meaning God. In modern Paraguayan Guarani, the same word is rendered "".
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.
Jopara, a 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.
Phonology Guarani syllables consist of a consonant plus a vowel or a vowel alone; syllables ending in a consonant or containing 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 + Guarani consonants Labial Alveolar Alveo-palatal Velar Glottal Nasal ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Stop Fricative ~ Approximant ~ ~ ~ ~ Flap ~
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.
Some linguists additionally include the phoneme (written ), though it is considered controversial as it appears exclusively in the suffix -nte. Nonetheless, it is typically included in the Guarani alphabet.
Oral may be realized as , , , , , depending on the word and speaker, but the nasal allophone is always .
The palato-alveolar sibilant is often articulated closer to alveolo-palatal .
The dorsal fricative is in free variation between and .
The approximant may be nasalized and partially labialized , and may also be realized as a fricative or a fully labialized approximant .
From Spanish loanwords, what had originally been a typical alveolar trill (written ) became a retroflex sibilant . The alveolar lateral also entered Guarani phonology through Spanish loanwords, but is now a typical phoneme (unlike , which is considered marginal). The consonants , , and may also appear in loanwords.
All syllables are open, viz. CV or V, ending in a vowel.
Glottal stop The glottal stop, called 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" is pronounced . 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 for "I have something brought"). 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 correspond more or less to the Spanish and IPA equivalents, although sometimes the open-mid allophones , are used more frequently. The grapheme represents the vowel . Considering nasality, the vowel system is perfectly symmetrical, each oral vowel having a nasal counterpart (many systems with nasals have fewer nasals than orals).
+ Vowels Front Central Back Close Mid Open
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,
→ →
However, a second stressed syllable, with an oral vowel, will not become nasalized: → →
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 vs nasal .
Orthography
+ Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)AÃChEẼGG̃HIĨJKLMMbNNdNgNtÑOÕPRRrSTUŨVYỸ Minuscule forms (also called lowercase or small letters)aãcheẽgg̃hiĩjklmmbnndngntñoõprrrstuũvyỹ IPA phonemesaãʃ~ɕeẽɰ~ɣŋhiĩʝ~dʒklmᵐbnⁿdᵑɡⁿtɲoõpɾʐstuũʋɨɨ̃ʔ
Sounds which only become nasalized due to nasal harmony are typically written as their phonemic values rather than their phonetic ones. For example, if a vowel is not 'canonically' nasal, but is under context of nasal harmony, it is still written without a diacritic.
Morphology 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.
Verb Guarani stems can be divided into a number of conjugation classes, which are called (with the subclass ) and . The names for these classes stem from the names of the prefixes for 1st and 2nd person singular.