Ojepuruve la Guaraní, pero siempre oĩ algunas palabras en castellano:

The contact phenomenon of Jopará

Julianne Hammink

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 Ojepuruve la Guaraní, pero siempre oĩ algunas palabras en castellano1:

The contact phenomenon of Jopará

Introduction

Paraguay has often been cited as an example of a stable bilingual society (Rubin, 1968).

The official languages of Paraguay are Spanish and Guaraní, and the Paraguayan national census

of 2002 reports that approximately 87% of the population speaks at least some Guaraní, with

59% of households using mostly Guaraní. 69% of Paraguayans speak some Spanish, with 36%

preferring to use Spanish in the home, and less than 10% monolingual in Spanish. 53 % of

Paraguayans over the age of 4 are bilingual in Guaraní and Spanish (Paraguay, 2002). The 1992

census found that 50% of the Paraguayan population was bilingual at that time, while 37% was

monolingual in Guaraní, and 7% monolingual in Spanish (Sarubbi Zaldívar, 1997). This census

data does not distinguish between rural and urban populations, which according to Choi (2003)

have quite different linguistic profiles, with Guaraní monolingualism the majority in rural areas,

and approximately half of urban residents Guaraní-Spanish bilinguals. Nevertheless, it is clear

that a language contact situation exists, and has existed for almost five hundred years (Liviares

Banks & Santiago Dávalos, 1982), in Paraguay. Gynan (1997) projects that, if trends continue,

Paraguayan Spanish-Guaraní bilingualism will increase substantially in the next century. By

2110, he predicts, 65% of the population will be bilingual, while Guaraní monolingualism will

have dropped to 20%.

Language contact situations can have many outcomes. Borrowing, code switching, mixed

languages, pidgin and creole languages are all the result of linguistic contact. Grosjean (1982)

1 “Guaraní is used more, but there are always a few words in Spanish.” (Thun, 2005)

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and Myers-Scotton (2002) note that, absent some motivation, the eventual outcome of linguistic

contact is monolingualism, whether through language shift, revitalization of the original

language, or pidginization and possibly creolization. Paraguay has not become monolingual, and

Grosjean attributes this prolonged bilingualism to diglossia: Spanish and Guaraní, he argues, are

used in different domains. Myers-Scotton (2002) agrees that language maintenance is the result

of compartmentalization: if each language has a specific societal use, then both languages are

more likely to be maintained.

Rubin (1968) found that, at the time of her study, Spanish was the language of literacy,

education and government, while Guaraní was generally the language of the home and informal

situations. The sociolinguistic situation in Paraguay has changed somewhat since then, however.

The new constitution of Paraguay, adopted in 1992, declared Guaraní and Spanish to be the co-

official languages of Paraguay, and guaranteed Guaraní-Spanish bilingual education for all

children. (Paraguay, 1992) In 1994, the bilingual education program was initiated in Paraguayan

schools. (Gynan, n.d.). Choi (2005a) revisited the semi-urban location of Rubin's study, and

found, perhaps surprisingly, that in most domains the use of Guaraní had declined in favor of

Spanish. The exception was in education, which Choi ascribes to bilingual education. Choi

argues that the urban shift toward Spanish reflects pressures of urbanization and modernization,

foreign influence by neighboring hispanophone countries, and the continuing dominance of

Spanish in the media and in government. It is important to recognize that Choi's study did not

examine the rural population of Paraguay which comprises about half of the population, and

where Guaraní monolingualism still predominates (Choi, 2003). In the most urban area of

Paraguay, the capital city of Asunción, Choi (2005b) finds that an increasing number of people

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are using both Guaraní and Spanish, rather than just Spanish, in the home. In work situations,

Spanish is still dominant, but an increasing number of respondents report using both languages

there as well.

Jopará

These statistics conceal a long-standing reality of Paraguayan linguistic practice:

bilinguals frequently use elements of both Spanish and Guaraní in a single utterance.2his practice

has existed in Paraguay since the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, according

to Thun (2005). The word Jopará (Guaraní "mixture") is used to describe the resulting linguistic

combination, as in examples (1)-(3) below (Guaraní morphemes are in boldface):

(1) Jesú, iy-agraciado la che tesorito.

Jesus, 3SG-handsome ART POSS little.treasure

Jesus, my little treasure is handsome. (Plá & Halley Mora, 1984)

(2) Prohibido estacionarse, he'i jagua tûngusú-pe

Prohibited to.park 3SG.said dog flea(s)-to

No parking, said the dog to the flea(s) (Masi Pallares & Giménez Ortega, 1994)

2 Vargas Catão (2009) has observed that a similar pattern of language mixing involving Portuguese and the
Guaraní varieties of Nhandeva and Kaiowá also occurs, among Brazilians who speak these languages.

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(3) ¿E cierto pa que Julio e tu novio?

Is true INT that Julio is your boyfriend?

Is it true that Julio is your boyfriend? (Ayala de Michelagnoli, 1989)

These examples, which were taken from literary works, demonstrate the range of possible

mixtures of Guaraní and Spanish that may be described as Jopará. Example (1) is taken from a

play by Paraguayan-Spanish writer Josefina Plá, and demonstrates a mixture of Spanish content

morphemes and Guaraní grammatical morphemes. Example (2) comes from a collection of

Paraguayan ñe'enga folk sayings, and demonstrates a language switch at the clausal level, which

is a typical structure for the genre. The third example, from a short story by Margot Ayala de

Michelagnoli, is essentially a Spanish utterance, with the Guaraní question particle pa inserted.

Jopará is quite different from "pure" forms of Guaraní such as academic/scientific

"Guaraní de escritorio" or Guaraníeté (Gynan, 1997), or tribal forms of Guaraní like Mbyá.

Some scholars regard Jopará as a separate language: Tovar (1982) argues that Jopará is a

Spanish-Guaraní mixed language with both grammatical and lexical material from both

languages. De Granda (1988, 1995a, 1995b) separates Guaraní-Spanish language mixtures into a

Guaraní-influenced Spanish, and what he calls a Guaraní criollo : a Spanish/Guaraní creole.

Usher de Herreros (1976) also claims that alongside Spanish and Guaraní exists a third linguistic

system, incorporating both Spanish and Guaraní into a new structure: the "third language" of

Jopará. Bakker, et al. (2008) argue that Jopará (which they equate with Paraguayan Guaraní) is

showing such a "strong convergence towards Spanish" that describing Jopará as a separate

language is justifiable. Thun (2005) describes both Paraguayan Spanish and Paraguayan Guaraní

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as mixed languages, and argues that Jopará is an instance of "alloglottal reproduction" in which

code switching is employed in a way that reflects the diglossic domains of the two languages.

Others view the varieties of linguistic mixtures found in Paraguay as a continuum with

varied amounts of material from the two languages, rather than several distinct varieties (Canese

& Corvalán, 1987 Corvalán 1990; Lustig, 1996; Melià, 2007; Ramírez, 2007). Lustig (1996)

describes Jopará as an "idioma esquivo:" a difficult to describe "mixture of languages, rather

than a mixed language." Lustig arrives at his conclusion based on his observation that Jopará

lacks the standardization and stability of a "true" language. Ramírez concurs with Lustig's

conclusions, and asserts that Jopará is, at a structural level, Guaraní with varying levels of

influence from Spanish. Ramírez admits, however, that the concept of "stability" as a defining

characteristic of a language is problematic because it ignores processes of language change.

Thus, two competing accounts of the nature of Jopará emerge: the continuum view and

the discontinuity view. The continuum view considers Guaraní and Spanish mixtures to range

along a continuum, with standard Castilian Spanish at one pole and tribal or academic Guaraní at

the other. In essence, this interpretation views Jopará as the result of various proportions of

Guaraní and Spanish code switching and borrowing. A continuity view rejects the idea of Jopará

as a mixed language because, with the lack of standardization, there is no definitive point at

which a separate language emerges.

Conversely, the discontinuity view asserts the essentially distinct nature of Paraguayan

languages. This view regards Jopará as a linguistic system, or mixed language, with a grammar

that is structured differently from either Spanish or Guaraní. The underlying assumption is a

pragmatic one: at the point where two linguistic varieties become mutually unintelligible, they

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should be considered to be separate languages. Proponents of this view argue that the

morphosyntactic changes in Paraguayan Spanish and Paraguayan Guaraní, plus the amount of

language mixing and borrowing that sometimes occurs, both serve to make the some language

varieties spoken in Paraguay unintelligible to speakers of “pure” forms of Guaraní or Spanish.

The fact that Spanish and Guaraní have each influenced the other in Paraguay is obvious

and uncontroversial, but interpretations of the linguistic evidence of this influence are

fragmentary and imprecise. To clarify the linguistic situation introduced above, it will be helpful

to consider theoretical models of the outcomes of language contact, and then re-examine the

available data in light of the predictions made by theory. In the following section I will outline

two relevant theoretical approaches and identify the implications of each for the language contact

situation in Paraguay.

Linguistic outcomes of language contact

Thomason and Kaufman (1988) distinguish between language contact in "maintenance"

situations where both languages are conserved, and language contact in "shift" situations where

speakers of a particular language are abandoning it in favor of another language. In maintenance

situations, language contact results in patterns of borrowing from the other language, while in

shift situations it is linguistic interference that causes change.

Borrowing

In environments where a group of people learn another language while maintaining their

first, language change occurs via borrowing, Thomason and Kaufman argue. Borrowing is

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defined as the "incorporation of foreign features into a group's native language by speakers of

that language" (Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). Generally words are what are borrowed first,

although in situations where a population has been bilingual for a prolonged period of time,

sometimes hundreds of years, structural borrowing may occur as well. In structural borrowing,

syntactic features are more likely to be borrowed than inflectional morphology, a tendency that

Thomason and Kaufman attribute to the high markedness of inflectional morphological systems,

in comparison to syntactic structures.

Lexical and structural borrowing can be quite extensive, but Thomason and Kaufman

argue that the borrowing language is still genetically the same unless the borrowing is so

extensive that entire systems (or large parts of them) are replaced, leading to a language with the

lexicon from one of the languages, and grammar from another. Thomason and Kaufman cite the

case of AngloRomani, which appears to have replaced the grammar of Romani with that of

English, while maintaining a mostly Romani lexicon. At this point of massive replacement,

Thomason and Kaufman contend that, because the grammar and lexicon of a language like

AngloRomani cannot be genetically traced to the same source, it is a new entity: a mixed

language.

Interference

Language shift environments lead to quite different outcomes in Thomason and

Kaufman's model. Interference is the result of linguistic contact where a population is shifting

toward a target language, but learns that language imperfectly. Interference occurs in phonology

and syntax more than, and before, the lexicon, so interference may result in a target language

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with phonological and syntactic features of the population's original language, but a target

language lexicon that includes few borrowings from the original language.

The extreme outcome of language shift is abrupt creolization, which occurs when the

population's access to the language it is in the process of acquiring is limited. In such a situation,

the target language vocabulary is acquired, but not the grammar, so that the result is a creole

grammar with the lexicon of the target language.

Language contact can take two paths, then. Either bilinguals in maintenance situations

borrow foreign vocabulary into their first language, and eventually possibly structural elements

as well; or else a population shifting to a new target language may bring along elements of their

original language's syntax and phonology, and changing the target language in the process.

Implications of this model for language contact in Paraguay depends upon which of these paths

Paraguayans have taken.

The linguistic contact situation in Paraguay is of long standing, and the proportion of the

population that is bilingual has remained relatively stable for at least the last fifty years (Rubin,

1968; Melià, 1982; Klee & Lynch, 2009) and may even be increasing (Gynan, 1997). The

linguistic situation in Paraguay can therefore be considered to be one of language maintenance,

rather than shift, so Thomason and Kaufman would predict that the kind of language contact

change that should occur would involve borrowing rather than interference. Lexical borrowing

would be expected, and because Paraguayan language contact has a five hundred year history the

possibility of syntactic borrowing would exist as well. Inflectional morphology should remain

unaffected by contact. Whether Jopará is a mixed language depends upon the somewhat vague

idea of how massive the “massive grammatical replacement” must be before Thomason and

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Kaufman's model would reclassify the language as mixed. In a later section, I will sketch some

of the lexical and grammatical changes that have been observed in both Paraguayan Guaraní and

Paraguayan Spanish, which may indicate the degree of contact-induced change that has occurred

in the languages.

In the next section, Thomason and Kaufman's diachronic account of language contact

phenomena will be complemented by a more synchronic approach: a set of models that is rooted

in psycholinguistic theory of language processing.

The Matrix Language Frame model

Myers-Scotton (1993) and Myers-Scotton and Jake (2000a, 2000b) have developed an

more psycholinguistically-oriented model of the effects of language contact upon the

grammatical structure of the languages involved. Originally developed as a model of bilingual

code switching, it has been extended to other language contact phenomena, including lexical

borrowing, mixed languages and creolization (Myers-Scotton 2002, 2003), and the authors of the

model contend that, while not itself a model of language processing, their framework has

implications for general models of language processing (Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000a).

The central idea of the Myers-Scotton Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model is that the

languages involved in code switching do not participate equally. There is an asymmetry in which

one language contributes the grammatical structure and structurally-assigned morphemes of the

clause. This language is called the "matrix language (ML). Other languages used in the clause

are called "embedded languages" (EL).

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 In what Myers-Scotton (1993) calls "classical code-switching," the ML and the EL may

interact in one of three ways within the clause. EL content morphemes may be inserted into the

ML framework, producing a clause with morphemes from both languages. Another possibility is

that of a ML island, in which all the morphology of a particular constituent comes from the

matrix language. Finally, EL islands can also occur. Within the EL island, EL structure obtains,

but the placement of the EL island constituent within the clause is constrained by the MLF.

This model requires that two ideas be clarified. First, it is necessary to distinguish

between the types of morphemes that can be inserted from the EL within a non-island clause and

those that cannot. Second, an adaptation of the MLF framework is required to account for

language contact data other than code switching. The following two sections will address each of

these issues in turn.

The 4-M model

Myers-Scotton and Jake (2000a, 2000b) added the 4-M submodel to better describe the

distribution of different types of morpheme in the type of multi-language utterance that the MLF

attempts to explain. Morphemes are divided into four groups according to a featural system. The

three features employed in this system are [± conceptually activated], [± assigns/receives a

thematic role], and [± refers to grammatical outside maximal projection of head]. Myers-Scotton

and Jake (2002a) summarize this system as in Figure 1:

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 [± conceptually activated]

[+conceptually activated] [-conceptually activated]

[± thematic role assigner/receiver] [±looks outside of maximal projection]

[+thematic role] [-thematic role] [-outside max. proj.] [+outside max. proj]

Content Early System Bridge Late System Outsider Late System

Figure 1. Feature-based classification of morphemes in the 4-M model (Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2000a)

Myers-Scotton and Jake assume a model of language processing in which content

morphemes are elected by the conceptual level as lemmas from the mental lexicon. The content

lemmas may in turn elect some non-content lemmas which express semantic features of the

conceptual level. This second group of morphemes is called “early system morphemes.” These

two groups of morphemes- content morphemes and early system morphemes- are both said to be

conceptually activated. The difference between them is that content morphemes either assign or

receive a thematic role, while early system morphemes do not. The class of content morphemes

includes nouns and verbs. Myers-Scotton and Jake also assign adjectives to the class of content

morphemes, because predicate adjectives also can assign thematic roles. Early system

morphemes may include determiners. Myers-Scotton claims that content morphemes and early

system morphemes are the most likely EL items to be inserted into a ML clause.

The other two classes of morpheme are not conceptually activated. Rather, these “late

system morphemes” are structurally assigned, and serve to indicate relationships between other

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morphemes and constituents (Myers-Scotton, 2008). They may be subdivided into morphemes

which look outside their maximal projection to determine their phonological form, and those

which do not. The former are called “outsider late system morphemes” and include items like

subject/verb agreement markers which depend upon the clausal subject to determine their form.

An outsider late system morpheme is coindexed with some other morpheme outside of its

maximal projection. The final group is called “bridge late system morphemes,” and may include

prepositions and some complementizers, which head their own maximal projections and

therefore are not reliant on information from outside their maximal projection to determine their

form. Bridge late system morphemes are involved in indicating hierarchical relationships among

other constituents. According to the 4-M and MLF models, the morphemes least likely to be

embedded from an EL into a ML clause are the late-system morphemes (Myers-Scotton, 2008).

The fundamental difference between conceptually-activated and structurally-assigned

morphemes is independently supported by evidence from second language acquisition and

aphasia research. Myers-Scotton and Jake (2000a, 2000b) reviewed research about apahasics

from a number of language backgrounds, and found that Broca's, or 'agrammatic,' aphasics

demonstrate a pattern of morpheme loss in which content and early system morphemes are

conserved, while late system morphemes are disrupted or missing. This suggests that the two

classes of morpheme have a different status in the mind, an idea that is consistent with the model

of language production assumed by Myers-Scotton and Jake.

Myers-Scotton and Jake also report that studies of the interlanguage of adults acquiring a

second language support the 4-M model. In a study of Chinese and Japanese learners of English,

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three homophonous English system morphemes displayed a hierarchy of accuracy consistent

with the three groups of system morphemes in the 4-M model. Plural s is considered by Myers-

Scotton and Jake to be an early system morpheme, while possessive 's is classified as a bridge

late system morpheme, and the s of present tense as an outsider late system morpheme. The data

revealed that subjects were most accurate in their production of the plural, and least accurate in

the production of the tense morpheme, a hierarchy which echoes the split between conceptually-

activated and structurally assigned morphemes.

Myers-Scotton (2008) mentions a detail about late system morphemes which may be

relevant to Guaraní and Jopará: in agglutinative languages with rich verbal morphology, even

bound verbal morphemes in the structure that are not classified as outsider late system

morphemes may resist switching. Myers-Scotton proposes that these morphemes may have some

type of interaction with the outsider morphemes in the structure, and that this interaction makes

the entire verb structure, with all its morphology, resistant to switching.

Abstract Level model

The theoretical framework above requires one more element if it is to attempt an

explanation of grammatical convergence and mixed languages. Myers-Scotton (2002, 2003)

expands the MLF model with the Abstract Level model. Briefly, this model states that a lemma

can be split into three abstract levels: a conceptual pragmatic/semantic level, a predicate

argument structure level that maps thematic roles to grammatical relations, and a morphological

realization level that determines the surface structure and order of morphology.

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 By splitting the lemma this way, Myers-Scotton allows for more switching possibilities:

these abstract levels of the lemma can be drawn from different languages. Thus the resulting

matrix language frame may not be identical to either source language, but instead a composite. In

linguistic convergence, then, all of the surface morphology may be from a single language, but

one or more of the abstract levels may come from another language, resulting in differences in

the surface order of morphemes, semantics, argument structure, or a combination of these. A

composite language frame may be employed in code switching so that instead of a matrix

language frame identical to one of the languages, the matrix language frame may in fact have

features of both at an abstract level. The creation of a composite matrix language frame is the

beginning of a process that Myers-Scotton calls “matrix language turnover,” in which the EL

gradually shifts to become the matrix language. Complete turnover is not a certainty, and Myers-

Scotton argues that a halted process of ML turnover can result in either convergence or a split

language. If the changes in the matrix language involve only the semantic level, with a shift in

the meaning of content morphemes and early system morphemes, then language convergence is

the result. If the changes involve the other abstract levels of the matrix language frame, and these

changes are fairly pervasive, then a split language is the result.

Both the historical approach of Thomason and Kaufman and the psycholinguistic models

of Myers Scotton and Jake outlined above may be useful for investigating the various types of

attested language contact phenomena in Paraguay. The final section of this paper will apply the

two approaches outlined above to linguistic evidence from Paraguayan Spanish and Paraguayan

Guaraní/Jopará, with the intent of gaining some preliminary insights into the nature of Jopará,

specifically, and the Paraguayan language contact situation in general.

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Examples of language mixing in Jopará

This section will present a representative selection of the types of mixed Guaraní/Spanish

utterances considered to be Jopará, as well as other examples of convergence. This is intended to

be a preliminary survey rather than an exhaustive analysis, and may raise more question than it

answers, suggesting directions for future research.

Grammatical sketch of Guaraní

Before inspecting examples of Jopará, a brief outline of Guaraní grammar will be helpful

for those unfamiliar with the language. Guaraní is considered a polysynthetic language by some

(Gómez-Rendón, 2007), but is probably better described as agglutinating (Canese, 1999), with an

especially rich inventory of verbal morphology:

(4) n- o- mbo- guata- se- vé- i- ta- pa- hina

NEG 3.act CAUS walk DES more NEG FUT INT PROG

‘Will he not want to make him walk anymore?’ (Canese, 1983)

Verbal morphology includes several classes of subject or object agreement markers, and affixes

for tense, aspect, causation, interrogatives and negation. Nominal morphology includes

postpositions, possessive markers and plural markers. Like Spanish, Guaraní is a pro-drop

language. Unlike Spanish, Guaraní does not mark grammatical gender.

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Borrowing

Jopará includes many words borrowed from Spanish. Morínigo (1931) and Armatto de

Welti (1995) have compiled extensive lists of Spanish word borrowings into Guaraní. These loan

words are marked with the appropriate Guaraní morphology, and are often phonologically

adapted to the phonotactics of Guaraní:

(5) la mbo'ehára Guaraní i-fanático

ART teacher Guaraní 3.stat-fanatic

“The Guaraní teacher is a fanatic.” (Bakker, et al., 2008)

(6) ña-hendu Kirito ñe'ë

1PL-listen Christ word

“We listen to Christ's word” (Bakker, et al., 2008)

The Spanish loanword fanático in (5) is marked with a Guaraní stative person agreement marker,

and is incorporated into the Guaraní matrix clause as any Guaraní adjective would be. The word

Kirito in (6) is a phonological adaptation of the Spanish word Cristo, with the epenthesis of a

vowel to break up a consonant cluster and the deletion of a syllable-final /s/ , neither of which is

permitted in Guaraní,. Both these borrowings have the same meaning in Guaraní that they do in

Spanish. Bakker, et al ((2008) found that most of the words of Spanish origin in their corpus of

Jopará speech were content morphemes: nouns (37.2%), verbs (18.3%) and adjectives (7.4%).

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This confirms the prediction made by Myers-Scotton's 4-M model that content morphemes are

more easily inserted into the MLF from the embedded language than are other types of

morpheme. Of the remaining hispanicisms in their corpus, 19.1% of them were the Spanish

article la, which the 4-M model would classify as an early content morpheme, and therefore

more easily embedded. Spanish conjunctions were 7.5% of the hispanicisms found, and

conjunctions could probably be classified as bridge late system morphemes, as they are

structurally assigned and serve to indicate hierarchical relationships among constituents.

Interestingly, another type of bridge late system morpheme was seldom attested in the corpus:

adpositions were only 0.5% of the tokens. This may be due to the constraints imposed by syntax:

Guaraní, presumably the matrix language, is postpositional, while Spanish is prepositional.

Recall that the MLF predicts that when there is a structural incongruence between the ML and

the EL, that the requirements of the ML will prevail(Myers-Scotton, 1993).

Code switching

Example (2) above, repeated here as (7), illustrates a straightforward case of code

switching at a clausal boundary.

(7) Prohibido estacionarse, // he'i jagua tûngusú-pe

Prohibited to.park 3SG.said dog flea(s)-to

No parking, said the dog to the flea(s) (Masi Pallares & Giménez Ortega, 1994)

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Example (8) is more complicated. While there appears to be a change of matrix language at the

clausal boundary, the second clause can be interpreted either as Spanish ML with a Guaraní verb

embedded, or as a continuation of Guaraní as the ML, with islands of Spanish embedded.

(8) O-je-puru-ve la Guaraní, //pero siempre oĩ algunas palabras en castellano

3-PASS-use-more ART Guaraní but always exist some words in Spanish

“Guaraní is used more, but there are always a few words in Spanish” (Thun, 2005)

Structural Convergence

One possible example of Guaraní's grammatical convergence with Spanish is what

Gómez Rendón (2007) claims is a loss of noun incorporation constructions in favor of syntactic

constructions typical of Spanish. Inalienable possession in Guaraní is indicated by the

incorporation of the possessed noun into the verb complex (Velazquez-Castillo, 1996), resulting

in a construction like (9):

(9) a- je- juru- hei- ta

1SG REFL mouth wash FUT

“I will wash my mouth.”

Gómez-Rendón claims that such incorporated structures are in decline, and that influence from

Spanish is causing analytical structures like (10) to be used instead:

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 (10) a-johei-ta che-juru

1SG-wash-FUT my-mouth

“I will wash my mouth.”

Similarly, Gómez-Rendón observes an increased use of the Guaraní verb guereko 'to have' in

environments where it was not originally used. Example (11) is the form showing convergence

with Spanish, and (12) shows an equivalent sentence without Spanish influence:

(11) o-porandu chéve mbovy mitã-pa a-guereko

3-ask to.me how.many child-INT 1SG-have

“He asked me how many children I have.” (Gómez-Rendón, 2007)

(12) o-porandu chéve mbovy che-ra'y

3-ask to.me how.many my-children

“He asked me how many children I have.” (Gómez-Rendón, 2007)

Finally, other authors have observed that even in clauses which contain no overt Guaraní

morphology, as in (13), the influence of Guaraní is evident in the syntax.

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 (13) Se murió un poco de nosotros (Usher de Herreros, 1976) (Paraguayan Spanish)

O-mano-mi ore-hegui (Guaraní)

3-die-just us-from

Se nos murió (Standard Spanish)

Utterances such as these suggest that there is a possibility of convergence of Spanish and

Guaraní at a syntactic level, consistent with the Abstract Level model proposed by Myers-

Scotton (2002, 2003).

Semantic Convergence

Examples (11) and (12) illustrate another form of convergence: the neutralization of

classes of words, mostly kinship terms, used by only men or women. The word for child in (11),

mitã, is a general term for child. The word ra'y used in (12) is only used by men to refer to their

sons. The loss of this semantic distinction in Jopará may be another indication of the

convergence of Jopará with Spanish. Morínigo (1982) notes a similar case of the neutralization

of gender-specific language. In Paraguayan Guaraní, the verb menda means “to marry,” and can

be used by a person of either gender. In pre-contact Guaraní, however, menda could only be used

by women to mean, literally, to get a man. Morínigo ascribes changes in the word's semantics to

the influence of Catholic missionaries, who adopted the word to refer to Christian marriage in

general.

Conclusion and directions for future research

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 These few examples are not sufficient to arrive at any definitive conclusions about the

status of Jopará, but they do indicate that influence from Spanish is deeper than simple lexical

borrowing and code switching. The syntactic and semantic systems of Jopará have also been

affected. To determine the extent of these changes would require a comparison of pre-contact

Guaraní with the Jopará/Paraguayan Guaraní in current use. Grammars of the Guaraní used in

colonial South America date back to 1640 (Ruiz de Montoya), and although no pre-contact

grammar of Guaraní is available some reconstruction of pre-contact Guaraní is being attempted

(Jensen, 1990). It may also be possible to compare Paraguayan Guaraní to tribal dialects of

Guaraní, such as Nhandeva, Mbyá, or Chiriguano, to suggest how the Paraguayan variety has

diverged from these.

Despite the widespread use of Jopará in in Paraguay, authentic examples of it are not

easily found. Paraguayan literature and media is almost exclusively in either standard Spanish or

academic Guaraní. A corpus of Jopará seems to be called for. To determine what form

colloquial Paraguayan Guaraní takes, it will be necessary to have ample examples of authentic

speech. Literary works in Guaraní are increasingly available (Appleyard, 1973; Plá & Halley

Mora, 1984; Ayala de Michelagnoli, 1989; Guaranía, 2008), and many of these include the

language mixing characteristic of Jopará, but it cannot be assumed that literary language reflects

colloquial language. It would be better to collect a corpus of the true speech of Paraguayans

speaking their everyday language of Jopará.

22
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