Guaraní language

Guarani (Avañe'ẽ), also called Paraguayan Guarani, is a language of South America that belongs to the Tupi–Guarani branch of the Tupian language family. 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.

Variants of the language are spoken by communities in neighboring countries including parts of northeastern Argentina, southeastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil. It is a second official language of the Argentine province of Corrientes since 2004 and in the Brazilian city of Tacuru since 2010. Guarani is also one of the three official languages of Mercosur, alongside Spanish and Portuguese.

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.

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.

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 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 "", 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.

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.

Writing system

Phonology

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 (written ). A trill (written ), and the consonants , , and (written ) are not native to Guarani, but come from Spanish.

Oral is often pronounced , , , , depending on the dialect, but the nasal allophone is always .

The dorsal fricative is in free variation between and .

, are approximants, not fricatives, but are sometimes transcribed , , as is conventional for Spanish. is also transcribed , which is essentially identical to .

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 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

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 (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,

: →
: →

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 .

Grammar

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.

Nouns

Guarani exhibits nominal tense: past, expressed with , and future, expressed with . For example, translates to "ex-president" while translates to "president-elect." The past morpheme 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, is "a person who studied to be a priest but didn't actually finish", or rather, "the ex-future priest". Some nouns use instead of and others use instead of .

Pronouns

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

Reflexive pronoun: : ("I look"), ("I look at myself")

Conjugation

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.

The conjugation is used to convey that the participant is actively involved, whereas the conjugation is used to convey that the participant is the undergoer. However, the conjugation is also used if an intransitive verb expresses an event as opposed to a state, for example 'die', and even with a verb such as 'sleep'. In addition, all borrowed Spanish verbs are adopted as as opposed to borrowed adjectives, which take . Intransitive verbs can take either conjugation, transitive verbs normally take , but can take for habitual readings. Nouns can also be conjugated, but only as . This conveys a predicative possessive reading.

Furthermore, the conjugations vary slightly according to the stem being oral or nasal.

Negation

Negation is indicated by a circumfix in Guarani. The preverbal portion of the circumfix is for oral bases and for nasal bases. For 2nd person singular, an epenthetic is inserted before the base, for 1st person plural inclusive, an epenthetic is inserted.

The postverbal portion is for bases ending in , and for all others. However, in spoken Guarani, the portion of the circumfix is frequently omitted for bases ending in .

The negation can be used in all tenses, but for future or irrealis reference, the normal tense marking is replaced by , resulting in -base- as in , "I won't do it".

There are also other negatives, such as: , , , , .

Tense and aspect morphemes

* : marks extreme proximity of the action, often translating to "just barely": , "He just barely arrived".
* : marks proximity of the action. , "I just ate" ( irregular first person singular form of , "to eat"). It can also be used after a pronoun, as in , "and about what happened to me, I was lucky".
* : indicates a fact that occurred long ago and asserts that it's really truth. , "he/she went missing a long time ago".
* : tells that the speaker was doubtful before but he's sure at the moment he speaks. , "so then you bought a new television after all".
* : expresses the uncertainty of a perfect-aspect fact. , "I think you lived in Asunción for a while". Nevertheless, nowadays this morpheme has lost some of its meaning, having a correspondence with and .
The verb form without suffixes at all is a present somewhat aorist: , "that day you got out and you went far".
* : is a future of immediate happening, it's also used as authoritarian imperative. , "he/she'll come back soon".
* : has the meaning of "already". , "I already did it".
These two suffixes can be added together: , "I'm already going".
* : indicates something not imminent or something that must be done for social or moral reasons, in this case corresponding to the German modal verb . , "that must be done".
* : indicates something that probably will happen or something the speaker imagines that is happening. It correlates in a certain way with the subjunctive of Spanish. , "the children are probably coming home now".
* , after nasal words: continual action at the moment of speaking, present and pluperfect continuous or emphatic. , "we're making fire"; , "it's ME!".
* : it has a subtle difference with in which indicates not necessarily what's being done at the moment of speaking. , "I'm working (not necessarily now)".
* : indicates proximity immediately before the start of the process. , "I'm near the point at which I will start to kill" or "I'm just about to kill". (A particular sandhi rule is applied here: if the verbs ends in , the suffix changes to ; , "I'll do it right now").
* : indicates emphatically that a process has all finished. , "I painted the wall completely".
This suffix can be joined with , making up : , "now we came to know all your thought".
* : customary action in the past: , "He used to come a lot".
These are unstressed suffixes: ; so the stress goes upon the last syllable of the verb or the last stressed syllable.

Other verbal morphemes

* : desiderative suffix: , "I want to study".
* : desiderative prefix: , "I pass", , "I would like to pass." is the underlying form. It is similar to the negative in that it has the same vowel alternations and deletions, depending on the person marker on the verb.

Spanish loans in Guarani

The close and prolonged contact Spanish and Guarani have experienced has resulted in many Guarani words of Spanish origin. Many of these loans were for things or concepts unknown to the New World prior to Spanish colonization. Examples are seen below:

Guarani loans in English

English has adopted a small number of words from Guarani (or perhaps the related Tupi) via Portuguese, mostly the names of animals or plants. " Jaguar" comes from and " piraña" comes from ("tooth fish" Tupi: 'fish', 'tooth'). Other words are: " agouti" from (which means "individual that eats standing up"), " tapir" from , " coati" from ''kuatĩ'' (which means "what is scratched, or gashed; what has stripes across the body"), " açaí" from (" ruit thatcries or expels water"), " warrah" from meaning "fox", and " margay" from meaning "small cat". Jacaranda
(y-acã-ratã, "that which has a firm core or heartwood" or "hard-headed"), guarana and manioc are words of Guarani or Tupi–Guarani origin. Ipecacuanha (the name of a medicinal drug) comes from a homonymous Tupi–Guarani name that can be rendered as , meaning a creeping plant that makes one vomit. " Cougar" is borrowed from Guarani ''guazu ara''.

The name of Paraguay is itself a Guarani word, as is the name of Uruguay. However, the exact meaning of either placename is subject to varied interpretations. (''See'': List of country-name etymologies.)

Example text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Guarani:
:
:

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
:''All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.''

Literature

A more modern translation of the whole Bible into Guarani is known as .

In 2019, Jehovah's Witnesses released the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures in Guarani, both in print and online.

Recently a series of novels in Guarani have been published:
* (Tadeo Zarratea, 1981)
* (Hugo Centurión, 2016)
* (Arnaldo Casco Villalba, 2017)

Institutions

* Ateneo de Lengua y Cultura Guaraní
* Yvy Marãeʼỹ Foundation

See also

* Guarani languages
* Nheengatu language
* Jopará
* Jesuit Reductions
* Mbyá Guaraní language
* Old Tupi
* Guarani Wikipedia
* WikiProject Guaraní

Notes

Bibliography

*

Sources

Further reading

*

External links

Guarani
at Wikibooks

Guarani Portal from the University of Mainz


www.guaranirenda.com
– Website about the Guarani language

Guarani and the Importance of Maintaining Indigenous Culture Through Language


Lenguas de Bolivia
(online edition)
* Duolingobr>course in Guarani

Resources

A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani
– by Bruno Estigarribia, UCL Press (open access, Creative Commons license)

Guarani Swadesh vocabulary list
(from Wiktionary)

Guarani–English Dictionary
from
Webster's Online Dictionary
– The Rosetta Edition

www.guarani.de
– Online dictionary in Spanish, German and Guarani


– by Maura Velázquez

Stative Verbs and Possession in Guarani
– University of Cologne – by Sebastian Nordhoff

Frases celebres del Latin traducidas al guarani


Spanish – Estructura Basica del Guarani and others

Etymological and Ethnographic Dictionary for Bolivian Guarani

Guaraní
( Intercontinental Dictionary Series)

{{Authority control

Agglutinative languages
Languages of Argentina
Languages of Bolivia
Languages of Brazil
Guarani
Indigenous languages of South America (Central)
Subject–verb–object languages