Guarani

Introduction

Guaraní (Avañe'ê), a language that belongs to the Tupi-Guaraní family of South America, is spoken by over 90% of Paraguay's population and by nearly one million Paraguayan emigrants and their descendants in Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. It is estimated that there are close to 7 million Guaraní speakers worldwide (Ethnologue). It is the only Indian language of the Americas that is spoken not only by the indigenous people but also by other ethnic groups.

Guaraní is one of the official languages of Paraguay along with Spanish. It is also the second official language of the Argentine province of Corrientes. Paraguay's constitution is bilingual, and school textbooks are typically half in Spanish and half in Guaraní. The two languages are considered equal.

The linguistic situation in Paraguay is quite complicated because almost nobody in Paraguay speaks 'pure Spanish' or 'pure Guaraní.' Rather most people code-switch between Spanish and Guaraní. At one extreme, better educated and more urbanized people tend to speak Spanish with a small amount of Guaraní. At the other extreme, less educated and more rural indigenous people tend to speak Guaraní with lots of Spanish words. This latter mix is called Jopará. Speakers of Guaraní who are not fluent in Spanish have restricted opportunities for education and employment.

Structure

Sound System

Children

Man

All syllables in Guaraní consist of a vowel or a consonant plus a vowel.

Vowels
Guaraní has six oral vowels /i/, /e/, //, /a/, /u, /o/. All vowels have nasal counterparts.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Alveopalatal	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p	.	t	.	j	k	?
Prenasalized stops	'b	.	't, 'd	.	.	'g	.
Fricatives	.	v	s	ch	.		h
Nasals	m	.	n	.	ñ	ng	.
Laterals	.	.	l	.	.	.	.
Tap or flap	.	.	r*	.	.	.	.
Trill	.	.	rr**	.	.	.	.

* as in Spanish pero 'but'
** as in Spanish perro 'dog'

All words in Guaraní are grouped into oral or nasal. A word is nasal if it has a nasal vowel or a nasal consonant. All the other words are oral. Nasal words take different suffixes and postpositions.

Grammar

Old Man

headress

Singer

Guarani is a highly agglutinative language, i.e., it adds various suffixes and prefixes to build words and to mark grammatical relations.

Nouns
Guarani nouns are not marked for gender or number. There is no definite article.

Pronouns
Guaraní distinguishes between inclusive (speaker + hearer) and exclusive (excluding hearer) first person plural.

xx	Singular	Plural
1st person	che	ñande (inclusive) ore (exclusive)
2nd person	nde	peê
3rd rd person	ha'e	ha'ekuéra

Verbs
Guarani verbs use prefixes to mark person and number. Below is an example of the conjugation of the verb guata "walk."

x	Singular		Plural
1st person	che	aguata	ñande	jaguata
1st person	che	aguata	ore	roguata
2nd person	nde	reguata	peê	peguata
3rd person	ha'e	oguata	ha'ekuéra	oguata

Oral and nasal verbs in Guaraní have different negated forms as in the example below:

Oral verb japo "make"	Nasal verb kororõ "snore"
*ndajapói*	*nakororõi*
"I don't make"	"I don't snore"

In addition, Guaraní verbs are marked for tense, aspect and mood.

Word order
The normal word order in Guarani is Subject- Verb-Object. If the subject is not specified, the word order is Object-Verb.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary

The main source of borrowing is Spanish. Compare the Guarani and Spanish versions of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to find such borrowings.

Guarani

Spanish
Todos los seres humanos nacen libres e iguales en dignidad y derechos y, dotados como estan de razon y conciencia, deben comportarse fraternalmente los unos con los otros.

Click here to listen to a dialog in Guarani. Look for Spanish borrowings in the dialog.

Writing

Guaraní became a written language relatively recently. The modern Guaraní alphabet is an adapted version of the Roman alphabet. Its orthography is largely phonemic (each letter represents one sound that distinguishes word meaning), with letter values mostly similar to those of Spanish. All vowels can take an acute accent to mark stress. Tilde marks nasalization.

A a		Ch ch	E e		G g		H h	I i
J j	K k	L l	M m	Mb mb	N n	Nd nd	Ng ng	Nt nt
	P p	R r	Rr rr	S s	T t	U u		V v	x
Y y		'

Piranha

Tapir

Guarani words in English
English has borrowed a number of words from Guaraní (via Portuguese). Among them are the following:

xx	from Guarani
piranha	pira nya, variant of pira'ya, literally 'scissors'
tapir	tapira, name of the animal
cashew	acajuba, name of the tree that produces the nut
tapioca	tipioca, from tipi "residue, dregs" + og, ok "to squeeze out" (from roots of the cassava plant)
jaguar	aguara, name of any large beast of prey

Resources

Click here to find out where Guarani is taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Guarani.

Online Resources for the study of Guarani
Guaraní Portal from the University of Mainz
Online Guaraní-Spanish-English-German Dictionary
Guaraní-English Dictionary
Interactive Dictionary of Guaraní
Ethnologue report on Guaraní
Wikipedia article on Guaraní