Guarani language

thumb|A Guarani speaker

Paraguayan Guarani, or simply 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.

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 Latin 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). 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". 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 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.

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

thumb|A government sign in [[Asunción, Paraguay; bilingual in Guarani and Spanish]]

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.

Guarani is also an official language of Bolivia and of Corrientes Province in Argentina.

! colspan="2" rowspan="2" |

! rowspan="2" | Labial

! rowspan="2" | Alveolar

! rowspan="2" | Alveo-<br>palatal

! colspan="2" | Velar

! rowspan="2" | Glottal

! ||

! colspan="2" | Nasal

| rowspan="2" |  ~ 

| rowspan="2" |

! rowspan="2" | Stop||

! colspan="2" | Fricative

| colspan="3" |  ~ 

! colspan="2" | Approximant

|  ~ 

! colspan="2" | 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 (most systems with nasals have fewer nasals than orals).

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

|+ 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

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center; margin: auto;"

|bgcolor="#EFEFEF" colspan="33"| Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)

|width="3%"|A||width="3%"|Ã||width="3%"|Ch||width="3%"|E||width="3%"|Ẽ||width="3%"|G||width="3%"|G̃||width="3%"|H||width="3%"|I||width="3%"|Ĩ||width="3%"|J||width="3%"|K||width="3%"|L||width="3%"|M||width="3%"|Mb||width="3%"|N||width="3%"|Nd||width="3%"|Ng||width="3%"|Nt||width="3%"|Ñ||width="3%"|O||width="3%"|Õ||width="3%"|P||width="3%"|R||width="3%"|Rr||width="3%"|S||width="3%"|T||width="3%"|U||width="3%"|Ũ||width="3%"|V||width="3%"|Y||width="3%"|Ỹ||width="3%"|Modifier letter apostrophe|

|bgcolor="#EFEFEF" colspan="33"| Minuscule forms (also called lowercase or small letters)

|a||ã||ch||e||ẽ||g||g̃||h||i||ĩ||j||k||l||m||mb||n||nd||ng||nt||ñ||o||õ||p||r||rr||s||t||u||ũ||v||y||ỹ||

|bgcolor="#EFEFEF" colspan="33"| IPA phonemes

|a||ã||ʃ~ɕ||e||ẽ||ɰ~ɣ||ŋ||h||i||ĩ||ʝ~dʒ||k||l||m||ᵐb||n||ⁿd||ᵑɡ||ⁿt||ɲ||o||õ||p||ɾ||ʐ||s||t||u||ũ||ʋ||ɨ||ɨ̃||ʔ

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

Pronouns

There are six different types of pronouns in Guarani: (i) personal; (ii) demonstrative; (iii) indefinite; (iv) numeral; (v) negative, and (vi) interrogative.

Personal Pronouns

{| class="wikitable"

|+Guarani Personal Pronouns

!1sg

|xee

!2sg

|ndee

!3sg

|ha’e

!1pl. incl.

|nhande

!1pl. excl.

|ore

!2pl

|peẽ or pende

!3pl

|ha’e kuery

Note. Chart above reprinted from R. Dooley.

First person plural pronouns in Guarani are distinguished by the clusivity of the subject being addressed.

{| class="wikitable"

!Example 1

!Example 2

!Example 3

!Example 4

Note. Data in chart reprinted from Estigarribia and Pinta.

Demonstrative Pronouns

{| class="wikitable"

|+Examples of Guarani Demonstrative Pronouns

!Attributives

!Non-attributives

|ko

|kóva

|"near the speaker"

|pe

|péva

|"near the addressee"

|upé

|upéva

|"away from both speaker and addressee"

Note. Chart above reprinted from E. Gregores and J. Suarez.

Indefinite Pronouns

{| class="wikitable"

|+Guarani Indefinite Pronouns

|amu.é

|"another"

|maimãramo

|"everybody"

|maimãva

|"any(one)"

|opá

|"every(body)"

|tóda

|"every(body)"

Note. Chart above reprinted from E. Gregores and J. Suarez. Inflectional affixes can be in turn divided into seven different components.

Reflexive inflection

The reflexive inflection within Guarani holds a specific morpheme, that being ‘ye-’.

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.

{| class="wikitable"

! colspan="2" |

! singular

! plural

! rowspan="2" | 1st person

! inclusive

| rowspan="2" |

! exclusive

! colspan="2" | 2nd person

! colspan="2" | 3rd person

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.

{| class="wikitable"

! rowspan="3" | pronoun

! colspan="2" |

! rowspan="2" |

! oral

! 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 .

{| class="wikitable"

! Oral verb

! Nasal verb

! With ending in "i"

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 true. , "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. Nominal tense can be defined as an action that is true to an individual in a particular point in time, e.g. "Yesterday, a student knitted’ in which the morphological marker for past tense in English, -ed, is attached to the action made by the student individual.

Temporal suffixes

In Guarani, however, verbs are often left unmarked for tense. Instead, the present is left without any type of tense marker or morpheme connected to it indicating it is present. As such, verbs falling under present tense can have relative flexibility in connection to temporality. In other words, verbs in the present tense have the flexibility of also meaning remote past or near future These are known as bare verbs, and refer to events that occur at the time of or shortly before the time of speaking. These sentences can only ever properly be used to answer questions in relation to the past, or in connection to the present, but never about the future.