Grammatical borrowing in Paraguayan Guaraní

Abstract:

1. Background Paraguayan Guaraní (henceforth PG) is a Tupi-Guaraní language spoken by five million people in Paraguay and the Argentinean Province of Corrientes. An overwhelming majority of speakers of PG are also speakers of Spanish with different degrees of bilingualism. The century-long contact between PG and Spanish has resulted in high levels of bilingualism and convergence. Contemporary Paraguayan Guaraní differs in several ways from pre-contact Guaraní1 as a result of lexical and grammatical borrowing from Spanish. Rather lately PG has been also in contact with other Indo-European languages such as German and Portuguese, but an evaluation thereof falls outside the scope of this chapter. The present contribution focuses on a one-to-one borrowing situation between Spanish and PG. 2 Too often Paraguay is presented as a model bilingual society without an accurate assessment of facts …

Año de publicación:

2007

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Fuente:

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