Blackwell Reference Online

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In Paraguay the language that captivates the national imagination is not Spanish, but Guaraní. Jones (1983 : 68) writes, “one notices immediately when talking to Paraguayans that they have an extraordinary interest in their languages, particularly Guaraní.” This fascination is rooted in a history of complex forces that produced the only American nation where the majoritarian non-indigenous population has embraced a native language as the symbol of its affective and cultural identity. Woodbridge wrote that “extremely little” had been written on Paraguayan Spanish ( 1960 : 45). Twenty years later, Germán de Granda observed that “the studies about the influence of Spanish on Guaraní are much better and also more numerous than those concerned with the inverse phenomenon, that is, the influence of Guaraní on Paraguayan Spanish” ( Granda 1980 : 57). The Guaraní language is a member of the non-Indo-European Tupi family, agglutinative and polysynthetic. To explain anomalous features of Paraguayan Spanish, one must know Guaraní. The unequal sociopolitical status of the two languages results in differential cross-linguistic transfer. Because Spanish is a marker of prestige, its intromission in Guaraní is a way of dressing up the oppressed tongue. Since Guaraní is associated with backwardness, Paraguayans avoid mixing Guaraní with Spanish in formal contexts. An illustration of this avoidance ... log in or subscribe to read full text