If you walk down the street in Paraguay, you will hear people speaking Spanish, the official language of most of the countries of Latin America. But, particularly if you are in the countryside, you will also hear something else: Guaraní.
It’s one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the Americas. A mother tongue of roughly six and half million people—in particular, in Paraguay. There, most Paraguayans speak Guaraní or a mixture of Guaraní and Spanish, regardless of whether or not they are Indigenous Guaraní, mestizo, or white.
The language has been preserved and passed down from generation to generation. Family to family. Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where a Native American language has resisted assimilation into Spanish or Portuguese, and where its very use was an act of resistance.
From 1864 through 1870, South America was embroiled in the bloodiest war of its history. It was called the Triple Alliance war. Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay duked it out with tiny landlocked Paraguay. Those countries invaded. The fighting raged for years. Hundreds of thousands of Paraguayans were killed. By 1870, roughly two thirds of the Paraguayan population was dead, most of them men.
Guaraní was the language of resistance against the invading forces; against the foreign troops that remained and occupied the country.
“As a question of survival, the women who were left would only speak Guaraní,” says campesino leader Tomas Zayas. “They passed it on to their children.” And it has continued to be passed on, particularly in the countryside. Until he was in his twenties, Zayas spoke only Guaraní.
“For me, Guaraní is identity,” he says. “It’s happiness. It’s beauty. Because a joke in Spanish isn’t funny at all.”
Guaraní has remained a language of resistance. Under the brutal dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, which lasted until the late 1980s, Guaraní was banned in Paraguay. Still it survived, spoken in homes and in rural communities. Though it has also been stigmatized as a language of the poor, there are still Guaraní language schools. And it is the language of the heart. The spirit of Paraguay. The language of resistance.
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Hi folks, thanks for listening. I’m your host Michael Fox. I did some reporting about Guaraní in Paraguay for The World last year. I’ll include a link to that story in the show notes.
This is episode 49 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.
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Written and produced by Michael Fox.
Here is Michael Fox’s reporting for The World on Guaraní: https://theworld.org/stories/2024/10/01/guarani-is-identity-how-an-indigenous-paraguayan-language-has-endured-through-the-ages
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.