Aspects of Dialectal Diversification of Guarani in Paraguay and Corrientes: Contact Between Two Given Languages in Different Settings

CHAPTER 11 Aspects of Dialectal Diversification of Guarani in Paraguay and Corrientes: Contact between Two Given Languages in Different Settings

Leonardo Cerno

1 Introduction. The Guarani Languages in Central South America

From a historical and geographical point of view, three main groups of Guarani dialects from the central South American region (comprising Bolivia, Paraguay, the Argentinian Northeast and Brazil’s Southeast) can be distinguished. The first group can be called “Ethnic Guarani”. It comprises the modern languages Mbyá Guarani, Kaiwá (or Paĩ Tavyterã), Ñandeva (or Avá-Guarani), Chaqueño Guarani (or Chiriguano and its dialects Avá and Isozeño), and Tapiete (Dietrich 2010a: 11; Rodrigues & Cabral 2002). All these languages are spoken by indigenous groups that, having not been integrated via the process of conquest and colonization, maintained a relative isolation until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Presently these languages show varying degrees of contact with national languages such as Spanish or Portuguese (Dietrich 2011a: 218). The second group, “Jesuit Guarani”, designates the dialects of Guarani spoken by indigenous people and priests in the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay (1611–1768). This language was codified and written by the Jesuit priests with the aim of teaching the Christian faith to the indigenous peoples. This Jesuit Guarani may have achieved certain uniformity towards the mid-eighteenth century, maintaining relative isolation from contact with colonial languages, but it disappeared following the slow dispersion of the reduced Indians after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. It is nowadays unknown to which degree Jesuit Guarani has influenced the Guarani spoken in the neighboring colonial settings after the end of the reductions (Dietrich 2002: 31; Rodrigues 1985: 42). Another unknown is to which degree the christianized variant standardized by the Jesuits corresponds to the variants the Indians spoke in daily life in the reductions and to what extent these variants underwent hispanicization (see Thun 2008). In any case, the recent discovery of ancient manuscripts from the Jesuit missions can give us a better idea of the particularities of the non-religious Guarani spoken by Indians in this context (Thun, Cerno, & Obermeier 2015 [1705]; Anonymous 1750; Adoue, Boidin, & Orantin 2015; Cerno

& Obermeier 2013). It is important to consider these issues because they enter into the discussion below. The third group is formed by the Guarani varieties that entered into contact with Spanish during the mid-sixteenth century amid the conquest of the River Plate (Río de la Plata). These varieties saw their grammar and lexicon modified as a result of the new contact scenario with Spanish. In this context, miscegenation, acculturation, and bilingualism were the mechanisms by which Guarani changed its inherited linguistic system and departed gradually from the neighboring indigenous dialects. These varieties of Guarani are spoken presently by about 5 million speakers, mostly in Paraguay, where Guarani is the official language alongside Spanish. The remaining speakers live in the Argentinean northeast and the Brazilian southeast, in a somewhat different sociolinguistic situation. In fact, in Argentina and Brazil, Guarani is histori- cally a migration language brought by Paraguayan migrants. This is the case of Guarani in Formosa, Chaco, and Misiones in northern Argentina, as well as in the states of Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. On the other hand, the case of Guarani in the northern Argentinean province of Corrientes is quite different given that, like the Guarani of Paraguay, it has been spoken there con- tinuously since colonial times. This chapter presents some aspects of the linguistic variation between two Guarani dialects, one spoken in Paraguay and the other in the province of Corrientes in Argentina. Both dialects have been strongly affected by language contact with Spanish since colonial times, and presently they exhibit a large number of phenomena attributed to this contact. However, the examples of variation in the Correntinean dialect cannot be attributed to the same causes as the Paraguayan ones. Historical and sociolinguistic features specific to the Correntinean speech community seem to explain this differential out- come. After characterizing the main linguistic and sociolinguistic differences between Guarani in Paraguay and Corrientes, five examples of linguistic variation are presented, followed by an analysis of the extent to which they are sys- temic to internal language change or due to external sociolinguistic reasons. The chapter concludes with a comparison to other mixed languages in order to generalize these findings on an abstract level.

2 Creole Guarani and its Dialects

In this chapter I will deal with two varieties included in this third group of Guarani dialects. Although this group is often named “Paraguayan Guarani” by scholars, this will be avoided here out of consideration for non-Paraguayan