La construcción del lenguaje en Paraguay: fonologías, ortografías e ideologías en un país multilingüe

Abstract

This paper analyzes a controversy about the inclusion of the Guarani language in the bilingual education system of Paraguay. The controversy is the result of the country’s complex sociolinguistic reality: Guarani is an official language and an important emblem of national identity, but also a language of inferior status to Spanish, which is known as a situation of “diglossia”. Moreover the speakers have negative attitudes towards their own speech practices, characterized by phenomena of convergence and mixing. This, some scholars identified as a “second order diglossia” between everyday discourse and the speech community’s ideological construction of “real” Guarani. In a controversial measure, government language planners have accredited a “hybrid” Guarani version that would allow language borrowings from Spanish to remedy this situation and to facilitate the teaching of Guarani, bringing the official version closer to everyday speech. This measure caused a heated debate about the version of Guarani that should be used in education. The debate will be used here to explore the dominant language ideologies in the country that are responsible for the difficulties in bilingual education and for the ambiguities in the use of and attitudes towards Guarani.