The Guarani alphabet (''achegety'') is used to write the

Guarani language Guarani (Avañe'ẽ), also called Paraguayan Guarani, is a language of South America that belongs to the Tupi–Guarani branch of the Tupian languages, Tupian language family. It is one of the two official languages of Paraguay (along with Spa ...

, spoken mostly in

Paraguay Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay, is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the Argentina–Paraguay border, south and southwest, Brazil to the Brazil–Paraguay border, east and northeast, and Boli ...

and nearby countries. It consists of 33 letters.

Orthography

Their respective names are: :''a'', ''ã'', ''che'', ''e'', ''ẽ'', ''ge'', ''g̃e'', ''he'', ''i'', ''ĩ'', ''je'', ''ke'', ''le'', ''me'', ''mbe'', ''ne'', ''nde'', ''nge'', ''nte'', ''ñe'', ''o'', ''õ'', ''pe'', ''re'', ''rre'', ''se'', ''te'', ''u'', ''ũ'', ''ve'', ''y'', ''ỹ'', ''puso''.

Description

The six letters ⟨a, e, i, o, u, and y⟩ denote vowel sounds, the same as in Spanish, except that ⟨y⟩ is a high central vowel, . The vowel variants with a

tilde The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...

are

nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . ...

. (Older books used diaereses or

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...

es to mark nasalization.) The apostrophe called "'" (lit., ''sound cut off'') represents a

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

; older books wrote it with . All the other letters (including ⟨ ñ⟩, ⟨

g̃ G̃ / g̃ is a Letter (alphabet), letter which combines the common letter G with a tilde. The character doesn't exist in most alphabets. Examples of alphabets with this letter are: * Guarani alphabet – where the tilde marks nasalization of , ...

⟩, and the digraphs) are consonants, pronounced for the most part as in Spanish. The Latin letters b, c, and d are used only as parts of digraphs, while f, q, w, x, and z are not used at all. (Older books wrote modern and as and , respectively.) The letter L and the digraph are only used in words adopted from Spanish. The Spanish digraph is not used in Guarani. Despite its spelling, the digraph is not the Spanish affricate sound (English ⟨ch⟩ as in ''teach''), but an alveolo-palatal fricative (similar English ⟨sh⟩ as in ''ship'', or French ⟨ch⟩ as in ''chapeau''). Occasionally, is written for this sound, following Portuguese and medieval Spanish usage. ⟨g⟩ is the voiced velar approximant , similar to Spanish ''haga''; it is not a

plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

() as in English ''gate''. ⟨v⟩ is the English and French voiced labiodental fricative , as in ''Victor'', not the Spanish

bilabial In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tling ...

. It is also pronounced as the

labiodental In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and . In English, labiodentalized /s/, /z/ and /r/ are characteristic of some individuals; these may be written . Labiodental consonants in ...

approximant , which is like with the lower lip touching the upper teeth. ⟨h⟩ and ⟨j⟩ are used with their English values, as in ''hand'' and ''jelly''; older books wrote these sounds with and , respectively. For some speakers, freely varies with the Spanish , like the ⟨j⟩ in ''José''. In some dialects, the letter ⟨j⟩ is pronounced (a pre-stopped palatal approximant). The tilded versions of E, I, U, Y, and G are not available in

ISO Latin-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology—8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987 ...

fonts, but can be represented in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

(except that tilded "G" is not available as a single precomposed letter, and must be encoded as a plain "G" plus a combining tilde). In digital environments where those glyphs are not available, the tilde is often postfixed to the base character ("E~", "I~", "U~", "Y~", "G~") or a circumflex is used instead ("Ê", "Î", "Û", "Ŷ", "Ĝ"). The

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

"´" is used to indicate the stress (''muanduhe''), as in ''áva'' ("hair") and ''tái'' ("peppery"). When omitted, the stress falls on a nasalized vowel, or, if none, on the last syllable, as in ''syva'' ("forehead") and ''tata'' ("fire").

History

Up to the

Spanish Conquest The Spanish Empire, sometimes referred to as the Hispanic Monarchy or the Catholic Monarchy, was a colonial empire that existed between 1492 and 1976. In conjunction with the Portuguese Empire, it ushered in the European Age of Discovery. It ...

of the Americas in the 16th century, the

Guaraní Guarani, Guaraní or Guarany may refer to Ethnography * Guaraní people, an indigenous people from South America's interior (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia) * Guarani language, or Paraguayan Guarani, an official language of Paraguay * G ...

people did not have a writing system. The first written texts in Guaraní were produced by

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

missionaries, using the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

. The priest Antonio Ruíz de Montoya documented the language in his works ''Tesoro de la lengua guaraní'' (a Guarani-Spanish

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

, printed in 1639) and ''Arte y bocabvlario de la lengua guaraní'' (a

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

compendium and dictionary, printed in 1722) among others. The alphabet and spelling used in those early books were somewhat inconsistent and substantially different from the modern ones. In 1867, Mariscal

Francisco Solano López Francisco Solano López Carrillo (24 July 1827 or 1826 – 1 March 1870) was a Paraguay, Paraguayan statesman, Officer (armed forces), military officer and politician who served as President of Paraguay between 1862 and 1870, of which he serve ...

, president of Paraguay, convened a Script Council to regulate the writing, but the effort was not successful. The orthography was finally standardized in its present form in 1950, at the Guarani Language Congress in

Montevideo Montevideo (, ; ) is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Uruguay, largest city of Uruguay. According to the 2023 census, the city proper has a population of 1,302,954 (about 37.2% of the country's total population) in an area of . M ...

, by initiative of . The standards was influenced by the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

notation, and it is now universally used in Paraguay. Nonetheless, there is still some disagreement between literates on details of the standard. Some feel that the digraph should be changed to (as in Portuguese, Galician and

Old Spanish Old Spanish (, , ; ), also known as Old Castilian or Medieval Spanish, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance spoken predominantly in Castile and environs during the Middle Ages. The earliest, longest, and most famous literary composition in O ...

), and that should be replaced by plain , with the tilde being placed on one of the adjacent vowels. The Guarani name for the alphabet, ', is a

neologism In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered ...

formed from ''a-che-ge'' (the names of the first three letters) and ''ty'' meaning "grouping", "ensemble".

Toponyms and proper names

There are many

toponym Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of ''wikt:toponym, toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage, and types. ''Toponym'' is the general term for ...

s and some proper names derived from Guarani in

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

Argentina Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...

Uruguay Uruguay, officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast, while bordering the Río de la Plata to the south and the A ...

, and

Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...

. These are usually written according to the Spanish and Portuguese systems, and their pronunciation has often changed considerably over the centuries, to the point that they may no longer be understood by modern Guarani speakers.

References

{{reflist

External links