Guaraní language

Guaraní (local name: avañe'ẽ ) is an Amerindian language of South America that belongs to the Tupí-Guaraní subfamily. It is one of the official languages of Paraguay (along with Spanish), where it is spoken by 94% of the population. It is also spoken by indigenous communities in neighbouring countries, including northern Argentina, eastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil. It is also treated as a second official language of the Argentine province of Corrientes ^*.

It is the only indigenous language of the Americas whose overwhelming majority of speakers are non-indigenous people. This is an anomaly in the Americas where language shift towards more prestigious official languages (in this case Spanish) has otherwise been a nearly universal cultural and identity marker of mestizos (people of mixed Spanish and Amerindian ancestry), and also of culturally assimilated, upwardly-mobile Amerindian people.

Jesuit priest Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, who wrote a book called Tesoro de la lengua guaraní ("The Treasure of the Guaraní Language"), described Guaraní as a language "so copious and elegant that it can compete with the most famous languages."

It is estimated that there are approximately 7 million Guaraní speakers worldwide.

Predominance of Guaraní

Paraguay

Guaraní is, alongside Spanish, one of the official languages of Paraguay. Thus, for example, Paraguay's constitution is bilingual, and its state-produced textbooks are typically half in Spanish and half in Guaraní. This policy seems to suggest that the two languages are "separate but equal".

Nonetheless, the two languages have a very complicated relationship. In practice, almost nobody in Paraguay speaks "pure Spanish" or "pure Guaraní", but rather a combination which varies according to the social class, lifestyle and racial origin of the speaker. Thus, the more well-educated, more urban, and more European-descended population tends to speak Argentine-influenced Spanish with short phrases of Guaraní thrown in, while the less educated, more rural, and more Amerindian-descended population tends to speak a Guaraní with significant vocabulary-borrowing from Spanish (or Portuguese). This latter mix is known as Jopara .

Speakers of Guaraní who are not fluent in any other language have markedly limited opportunities for education and employment. There are very few speakers of Guaraní outside of South America. Those few that exist include scholars, missionaries, and agents of the Peace Corps.

Argentina

Guaraní is like an official language in the provinces of Corrientes, alongside Spanish.

Brazil

The Guaraní language, together with its near-identical sisters, Nheengatu and Língua Geral Paulista, was once as prevalent in Brazil as it still is in Paraguay. The language began a long period of decline in Brazil when the Jesuits, who had done much to spread and standardize it, were expelled from the country. However, Guaraní still survives in scattered pockets throughout Brazil. Interestingly, one of those pockets can be found in a rural district within the municipality of São Paulo, Brazil's largest city. In fact, Olívio Jekupé, a resident of Krukutu village, located in this area, has even published a book of folk tales written in Guaraní and Portuguese.

History

Guaraní persisted with enough vigor to be made official because the Jesuits elected it as the language to preach Catholicism to the Indians (Guaraní was the language of the autonomous Jesuit Reducciones) and because Paraguay's dictators for a time shut the country's borders and thereby protected the local culture and language.

Writing system

Guaraní became a written language relatively recently. The modern Guaraní alphabet is basically a subset of the Latin alphabet (with "J", "K" and "Y" but not "W"), complemented with two diacritics and 6 digraphs. Its orthography is largely phonemic, with letter values mostly similar to those of Spanish. All vowels can take an acute accent (´) to mark stress (Á/á É/é Í/í Ó/ó Ú/ú), but the resulting graphemes are not letters of the alphabet. The tilde marks nasalisation and is used with many letters, that are considered part of the alphabet: Ã/ã Ẽ/ẽ G̃/g̃ Ĩ/ĩ Ñ/ñ Õ/õ Ũ/ũ Ỹ/ỹ. (Note that G/g with tilde is not available as a precomposed glyph in Unicode).

Phonology

Guaraní only allows syllables consisting of a vowel or a consonant plus a vowel; a syllable ending in a consonant or two or more consonants together (except "digraphs") are not possible. This is represented (C)V(V).

Vowels: correspond to the Spanish and IPA equivalents, although sometimes the allophones , are used more frequently; y is the close central unrounded vowel .

i	ɨ	u
e		o
	a

All these vowels have nasalized counterparts.

Consonants:

{| border="2" cellpadding="5" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; line-height: 1.2em; border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center; background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaa solid;" Bilabial Labiodental Alveolar Alveo-palatal Palatal Velar Glottal Plosives (j) (') Nasals (ñ) (g̃) Prenasalized stops (mb) (nt nd) (ng) Trill (rr) Tap or Flap (r) Fricatives (ch) (g) Approximant (v) Lateral , , are allophones with , and respectively.

is often substituted with , notably in bilingual speakers.

The glottal stop is only found between vowels.

The alveolar trill () and alveolar lateral approximant () are not sounds native to Guaraní.

Nasal Sandhi

For euphonic purposes, words are grouped in oral and nasal. A word is nasal if it has at least one of these nasal letters: ã - ẽ - ĩ - õ - ũ - ỹ - g̃ - m - mb - n - nd - ng - nt - ñ , and all the rest being oral. A nasal word acquires different versions of prefixes and postpositions. For example, the postpositions pe, ta turn into me, nda respectively after nasal words.

Grammar

Guaraní is highly agglutinative. It's a fluid-S type active language and it has been classified as a 6th class language in the Milewski's typology. It uses Subject Verb Object alignment usually, but Object Verb when the subject is not specified.

The language lacks gender, distinction between singular and plural, and has no definite article.

Pronouns

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

	first	second	third
singular	che	nde	ha'e
plural	ñande (inclusive), ore (exclusive)	peẽ	ha'ekuéra

Reflexive pronoun: je: ahecha ("I look"), ajehecha ("I look at myself")

Conjugation

The verb is conjugated in every person and number incorporating prefixes.

Verb root guata ("walk").

Pronoun	Preposition	Conjugated Form
che	a-	aguata
nde	re-	reguata
ha'e	o-	oguata
ñande	ja-	jaguata
ore	ro-	roguata
peẽ	pe-	peguata
ha'ekuéra	o-	oguata

The prefix for the third person is the same in singular and plural. Ja turns into ña before nasal verbs.

Negation

In Guaraní, like in Japanese, the verb is conjugated differently to indicate negation. This is made basically adding nd- and -i, thus n- in nasal verbs and -ri instead of i when the verb already end in an "i". The latter is an unstressed suffix. japo (do, make) kororõ (roar, snore) jupi (go up, rise)

Oral verb	Nasal verb	With ending in "i"
ndajapói	nakororõi	ndajupíri
nderejapói	nderekororõi	nderejupíri
ndojapói	nokororõi	ndojupíri
ndajajapói	ndañakororõi	ndajajupíri
ndorojapói	norokororõi	ndorojupíri
ndapejapói	ndapekororõi	ndapejupíri
ndojapói	nokororõi	ndojupíri

The negated form can be merged with the immediate future suffix ta, resulting in mo'ãi. Ndajapomo'ãi, "I won't do it".

Tense and Aspect Morphemes

-kuri: marks proximity of the action. Ha'ukuri, "I just ate" (ha'u irregular first person singular form of u, "to eat"). It can also be used after a pronoun, ha che kuri, che po'a, "and about what happened to me, I was lucky"
-va'ekue: indicates a fact that occurred long ago and asserts that it's really truth. Okañyva'ekue, "he/she went missing a long time ago"
-ra'e: tells that the speaker was doubtful before but he's sure at the moment he speaks. Nde rejoguara'e peteĩ ta'angambyry pyahu, "so then you bought a new television after all"
-raka'e: expresses the uncertainty of a perfect-aspect fact. Peẽ peikoraka'e Asunción-pe, "I think you lived in Asunción for a while". Nevertheless nowadays this morpheme has lost some of its meaning, having a correspondence with ra'e and va'ekue

The verb form without suffixes at all is a present somewhat aorist: Upe ára resẽ reho mombyry, "that day you got out and you went far"

-ta: is a future of immediate happening, it's also used as authoritarian imperative. Oujeýta ag̃aite, "he/she'll come back soon".
-ma: has the meaning of "already". Ajapóma, "I already did it".

These two suffixes can be added together: ahátama, "I'm already going"

-va'erã: indicates something not imminent or something that must be done for social or moral reasons, in this case corresponds to the German modal verb sollen. Péa ojejapova'erã, "that must be done"
-ne: indicates something that probably will happen or something the speaker imagines that is happening. It correlates in certain way with the subjunctive of Spanish. Mitãnguéra ág̃a og̃uahéne hógape, "the children are probably coming home now"
-hína, ína after nasal words: continual action at the moment of speaking, present and pluperfect continuous or emphatic. Rojatapyhína, "we're making fire"; che ha'ehína, "it's ME!"
-vo: it has a subtle difference with hína in which vo indicates not necessarily what's being done at the moment of speaking. amba'apóvo, "I'm working (not necessarily now)"
-pota: indicates proximity immediately before the start of the process. Ajukapota, "I'm near the edge in which I will start to kill". (A particular sandhi rule is applied here: if the verbs ends in "po", the sufix changes to mbota; ajapombota, "I'll do it right now")
-pa: indicates emphatically that a process has all finished. Amboparapa pe ogyke, "I painted the wall completely"

This suffix can be joined with ma, making up páma: ñande jaikuaapáma nde remimo'ã, "now we became to know all your thought" These are unstressed suffixes: ta, ma, ne, vo; so the stress go upon the last syllable of the verb

Guaraní loans to English

The words that English has borrowed from Guaraní are mostly names of animals. "Jaguar" comes from jaguarete. Other words are: "agouti" from akuti and "tapir" from tapira. Also "piranha" is derived from pira aña or devil fish.

External links

Ethnologue reports for Guarani languages
Guarani - English Dictionary: from *Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition.
Guaraní Portal from the University of Mainz:
www.guarani.de: - online dictionary in Spanish, German and Guarani
www.guaranirenda.com: - about the Guarani language
Guaraní Possessive Constructions: - by Maura Velázquez.
Stative Verbs and Possessions in Guaraní: - University of Köln
An article written in Guarani: - a sample of the Guarani language

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