<div dir="ltr"><h1 id="gmail-headline" class="gmail-headline" style="max-width:813.986px">Newfound Pride in Guaraní, a Language Long Disdained in Paraguay</h1>
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<p class="gmail-byline-dateline"><span class="gmail-byline">By <span class="gmail-byline-author">MYLES McCORMICK</span></span><time class="gmail-dateline" datetime="2018-01-06T09:10:21-05:00">JAN. 6, 2018</time>
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<figcaption class="gmail-caption">
<span class="gmail-caption-text">Dancers waiting backstage to
take part in a televised Christmas special broadcast in the Guaraní
language last month in Asunción, Paraguay.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
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Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-1">ASUNCIÓN,
Paraguay — When she was a student in Paraguay, teachers forced her to
kneel on jagged granules of salt and maize for entire mornings as
punishment for speaking her mother tongue, Guaraní, in the classroom.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“I
had to do it in front of my friends so that they saw in black and white
what happens to people who speak the language,” said Porfiria Orrego
Invernizzi, now 67, and a language activist.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Other
students were deprived of food and water for the day, forced to wear
diapers to class as a form of humiliation or simply beaten for speaking
the indigenous language. Treatment of this sort existed in Paraguayan
schools throughout much of the country’s history, up until the fall of
the dictator Alfredo Stroessner, whose 35-year rule ended in 1989.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005644930" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005644930 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">Families from a
Guaraní-speaking ethnic group camping outside the National Congress in
Asunción, the capital, to demand reparation after being evicted from
their land.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
<span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“It
was a question of open persecution,” said David Galeano Olivera, the
head of the Lyceum of Guaraní Language and Culture, which trains
teachers in the language.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-2">Despite its widespread use — Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where the majority of the population <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/world/americas/in-paraguay-indigenous-language-with-unique-staying-power.html">speaks a single indigenous language</a> — Guaraní has long been considered palatable for use on the streets and at home, but unsuitable in the spheres of power.</p> <a class="gmail-visually-hidden gmail-skip-to-text-link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/world/americas/paraguay-guarani-language.html?_r=0#story-continues-3">Continue reading the main story</a>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-4">Yet
today, officials and intellectuals in Paraguay are working to promote a
positive image of the language, in an effort to make good on the 1992
Constitution’s aim to put it on equal footing with Spanish.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">It has been a slog. Centuries of subjugation made Guaraní a second-class language in the minds of many Paraguayans.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005644943" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005644943 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">Rolando Ruiz Diaz, a dental
patient who prefers to communicate in Guaraní, is being examined by
Anthia Balbuena, seated, who speaks the language fluently.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
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Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Spanish is the dominant language in government ministries, the courts, the news media, literature, schools and professions.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“There
is a stigma, a prejudice, associated with Guaraní,” said Ladislaa
Alcaraz, the government’s Minister for Language Policy. “It is
associated with poverty, rurality, ignorance, with people who are
illiterate.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">An
effort to make public education bilingual, however, has met resistance
from a surprising group: Parents who were raised speaking Guaraní.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Many
still hold negative stereotypes of their language, and have pushed back
against their children being taught in Guaraní, with its high-pitched,
nasal and guttural sounds. They say that an emphasis on Spanish, or a
foreign language, would make their children more competitive in the job
market.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005644942" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005644942 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">A graduation party in Asunción for future teachers of the Guaraní language.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
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Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“Parents
say: ‘At home we speak Guaraní, so in the school they attend, I want
them to learn Spanish,’ ” said Nancy Benítez, a curriculum official at
the Ministry of Education. “They say: ‘Let other people’s kids learn it.
But not mine.’ ”</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-5">The government is hoping to change people’s perspective on the language by encouraging its use in official circles.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
Ministry of Language Policy, established in 2011, has been tasked with
normalizing and promoting the use of Guaraní across the government,
including in the Legislature and the courts. Judicial officials are
being taught Guaraní, and Paraguayans now have the right to a trial in
either Spanish or Guaraní.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
ministry in 2017 set up units in every government department — where
less than 1 percent of written communication with the public is carried
out in the language — to train civil servants in Guaraní.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005644934" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005644934 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">Members of the Sport Socho
amateur soccer club drinking beer after a match in Asunción. (“Socho”
means “drunk” in Guaraní slang.)</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
<span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“It’s a human rights issue,” Ms. Alcaraz said. “People who use Guaraní deserve to be tended to in Guaraní.”</p><figure class="gmail-media gmail-video gmail-youtube embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal">
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
effort to elevate the standing of Guaraní got a lift in 2014, when the
Parliament of Mercosur, the regional trading bloc, adopted it as an
official working language.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">All
this is the slowly unfurling result of a decision to make Paraguay
officially bilingual in its post-dictatorship Constitution, which gave
Guaraní and Spanish legal parity. The intent was to give a historically
marginalized segment of the population access to basic government
services, the justice system and medical care.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Speaking
only Guaraní “is a significant factor driving inequality,” said R.
Andrew Nickson, an expert in Paraguayan development policy at the
University of Birmingham in Britain. When it comes to having a voice on
various issues, monolingual Guaraní speakers, or those who speak only a
little Spanish, “fear they will be made fun of, so prefer to keep their
heads down and mouths shut,” he added.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005644940" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005644940 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<figcaption class="gmail-caption">
<span class="gmail-caption-text">Maria Antonia Andrada, a
Guaraní lanugage teacher, browsing in an archive for documents written
and classified in Guaraní in Asunción.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
<span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
majority of those who speak little or no Spanish live in the
countryside. One-third of Paraguayans tend to use only Guaraní at home.
But this figure doubles to nearly two-thirds if urban areas are
excluded.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-6">The push to improve the language’s image and expand its presence is having a noticeable effect.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Today,
a growing number of babies and businesses are being given Guaraní
names. Guaraní text can be seen on billboards and signs in Asunción, the
capital. Its music is no longer just confined to the folk genre;
artists are increasingly recording metal, rock and rap songs in Guaraní.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Online content in Guaraní is also steadily expanding. Vikipetâ, the Guaraní version of Wikipedia, gets 220,000 monthly visitors.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“We
are breaking out of the enclosure,” said Susy Delgado, who won the 2017
national literature prize for her work in the language. “Not as rapidly
as we would like, but we are breaking out.”</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005644947" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005644947 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<figcaption class="gmail-caption">
<span class="gmail-caption-text">Friends at breakfast speaking in Yopará, a version of Guaraní heavily influenced by Spanish and widely spoken by young people.</span>
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<span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">But
efforts to bring Guaraní on an equal footing with Spanish are “swimming
against the tide,” said Shaw N. Gynan, a linguist at Western Washington
University, who has done extensive research on Guaraní.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“It is in danger,” he said. “And it’s nothing to do with state policy.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Increasing
urbanization, caused by large-scale farming that has pushed people from
the countryside, is shrinking the monolingual Guaraní base.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">On
top of this, the bilingual education program is underfunded and has
failed to reach many areas of rural Paraguay, where Guaraní speakers are
still schooled in Spanish, leading many to drop out.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Part
of the problem is that the Guaraní taught in schools is a formal, and
somewhat anachronistic, version compared to the colloquial version
spoken on the street.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005644932" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005644932 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">Graffiti of an indigenous man reading a book in downtown Asunción.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
<span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“There
is something artificial in the Guaraní kids learn in school; it isn’t
the Guaraní used on the street,” Ms. Benitez said. “It isn’t the
language a referee uses in a football match. It isn’t the Guaraní that
you’re going to speak with a salesman.”</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-7">There is no standardized written form of Guaraní, and there is a fierce debate about what the official version should look like.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
Guaraní Language Academy, established in 2012, is split between those
who favor a purer version of the language, replacing words adopted from
Spanish with old Guaraní words, and those who believe it should be the
heavily Spanish-influenced version, known as Yopará, that is spoken on
the street.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">For at least one group of Paraguayans, knowledge of the language has become a key factor in their performance: politicians.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005644939" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005644939 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<figcaption class="gmail-caption">
<span class="gmail-caption-text">Girls dressed in folkloric costumes writing the name of their dance school, Yasi (or moon), in Guaraní.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
<span class="gmail-visually-hidden">Credit</span>
Dado Galdieri for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In
the recent past, not speaking Paraguay’s native language was no barrier
to those seeking to gain or stay in power. When he was dictator,
Stroessner never made a single address in Guaraní (although his wife
spoke the language and he rewarded rural Guaraní-speakers with land for
their loyalty to his regime).</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">But
now, voters are encouraged to check if candidates speak the language,
and those who do not face mockery on social media. The most recent
politician to feel the repercussions was Santiago Peña, a close ally of
President Horacio Cartes.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In
a result that surprised many, Mr. Peña failed to secure his party’s
nomination to contest the presidential elections in 2018, losing last
month in the primary of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/world/americas/14paraguay.html">the ruling Colorado party</a>
to Mario Abdo. One of the reasons for Mr. Peña’s downfall was an
elitist image painted by his opponents, aided in no small part by his
inability to speak Guaraní — something Mr. Abdo did not hesitate to
point out during the campaign.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Under
pressure from the electorate, Mr. Peña took a crash course in the
language, but it appeared to have done little to sway voters.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“It
wasn’t like this before,” said Maria Gloria Pereira, a policy maker and
former head of curriculum at the Ministry of Education. “Politicians
feel this pressure, because they know now that those that don’t speak
the language of the people are far from the people.”</p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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