Guarani Linguistics in the 21st Century by Bruno Estigarribia, Shaw Gynan, Jorge Gómez Rendón, Wolf Dietrich, Judith Tonhauser, Guillaume Thomas, Maura Velázquez-Castillo, Justin Pinta, Jennifer L. Smith, Leonardo Cerno, Andrew Stewart ISBN 9789004322561, 9789004322578, 9004322566, 9004322574, 18765580, 2017006689 instant download

Guarani Linguistics in the 21st Century by Bruno Estigarribia, Shaw Gynan, Jorge Gómez Rendón, Wolf Dietrich, Judith Tonhauser, Guillaume Thomas, Maura Velázquez-Castillo, Justin Pinta, Jennifer L. Smith, Leonardo Cerno, Andrew Stewart ISBN 9789004322561, 9789004322578, 9004322566, 9004322574, 18765580, 2017006689 instant download

This volume is dedicated to contemporary linguistic research of the Guarani languages, a subgroup of the Tupi-Guarani language family comprising Paraguayan Guarani (or Avañe'ẽ), Kaiwá (or Paĩ-Tavyterã), Nhandeva (or Chiripá), Xetá, Chiriguano (or Ava), Isosó (or Chané), Tapieté, and Guayakí (or Aché) (Rodrigues & Cabral 2012). Mbyá Guarani is not mentioned by Rodrigues and Cabral but it can be classified as a member of the Tupi-Guarani subgroup that includes Kaiwá, Nhandeva, and Chiriguano. Paraguayan Guarani is the most widely spoken language in this group and has the unique status of being the only indigenous language in the Americas spoken by a non-indigenous majority (about 80% of Paraguayans speak some variety of Guarani, but only around 1% of the population identifies as ethnically Guarani, according to preliminary data from the 2012 national census and data from the Permanent Survey of Homes of 2014). Moreover, Guarani figures in Paraguay’s 1992 Constitution as an official language on an equal footing with Spanish. Guarani’s singular circumstances raise pivotal questions about language planning and language survival in colonial settings, what it means for a language to be “indigenous”, and the putative impact these exceptional sociolinguistic situations have on the structural outcomes of prolonged contact. Most of the contributions in this volume examine this variety (except for Thomas’ contribution, which focuses on Mbyá Guarani, and Cerno’s contribution which discusses both Paraguayan and Correntinean Guarani). Accordingly, references to Guarani will be generally understood to mean Paraguayan Guarani, unless explicitly stated.