• DOI:10.1163/19552629-00802002
• Corpus ID: 142269645

Guaraní-Spanish Jopara Mixing in a Paraguayan Novel: Does it Reflect a Third Language, a Language Variety, or True Codeswitching?

@article{Estigarribia2015GuaranSpanishJM,
  title={Guaran{\'i}-Spanish Jopara Mixing in a Paraguayan Novel: Does it Reflect a Third Language, a Language Variety, or True Codeswitching?},
  author={Bruno Estigarribia},
  journal={Journal of Language Contact},
  year={2015},
  volume={8},
  pages={183-222}
}

• Bruno Estigarribia
• Published 27 February 2015
• Linguistics
• Journal of Language Contact

We study the highly idiosyncratic case of Paraguay, the only American nation where an indigenous language has survived as a majority language spoken by the non-indigenous population. Jopara is the name of the commonly used code that mixes Guarani and Spanish. Characterizations of Jopara in the literature are inconclusive. Some authors call it a variety of Spanish, some a variety of Guarani, others a new mixed language. The choice of one characterization over the other has important implications for the status of Guarani vis-a-vis Spanish, especially for Paraguay’s educational and language planning. Here we analyze Jopara as it is represented in the novel Ramona Quebranto (rq-Jopara). We show that this written code is not a variety of either Spanish or Guarani, nor a mixed language. Rather, it reflects properties of true code-switching. It displays both insertional and alternational characteristics (Muysken, 2000), as well as evidence of a composite matrix language (Myers-Scotton, 2002). We conclude by suggesting rq-Jopara fits best a “mixed lect” scenario (Backus, 2003) and discussing generalization to spoken Jopara.