Linguistic borrowing in paraguayan guaraní

Abstract:

1. Background Paraguayan Guaraní (henceforth PG) is a Tupi-Guaraní language spoken by some 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 Guaraní (PG) differs in several ways from pre-contact Guaraní1 as a result of Spanish lexical and grammatical borrowing. 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 paper. The present contribution focuses on a one-to-one borrowing situation between Spanish and PG2. Too often Paraguay is presented as a model bilingual society without an accurate assessment of facts. Numbers show a rather different scenario. According to the 2002 census3, Guaraní monolinguals (27%) are significantly more numerous than Spanish monolinguals (6.56%), particularly in rural areas. Furthermore, the percentage of bilinguals is only 59%, ie less than two thirds of the country’s population. Differences are also qualitative. Spanish and PG show complementary distribution across social spaces. This situation may be qualified as diglossic, with Spanish as the dominant language (Meliá 1992). Paraguay is a unique case in Latin America, but its uniqueness is founded less on bilingualism than on the fact that PG is the only Indian language spoken by non-Indian citizens as their mother tongue. As a matter of fact, rural PG shows less …

Año de publicación:

2006

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