Bilingualism in Paraguay

Paraguay represents the only country in which a Native American language, Guaraní, shares official status, along with Spanish. Most of the country is therefore bilingual.

NB. The name of the country is supposedly composed of these Guaraní elements, perhaps meaning the river that leads to the sea:

• para "large body of water; sea"
• gua "of"
• y "water"

A summary from Britannica online:

"Until 1992 Spanish was the official language, although Guaraní was spoken by nearly 90 percent of the population. But the 1992 constitution recognizes both Spanish and Guaraní as official languages. Spanish is used predominantly in government and business, but both Spanish and Guaraní are used as media of instruction. At least half of the population is bilingual. The constitution also recognizes Indian languages as part of the country's heritage."

Guaraní and Spanish

It has been claimed that the language of Paraguay is basically Guaraní rather than Spanish. These figures (possibly not up to date) support that observation.

Especially in rural areas, some people speak only Guaraní. In the cities, some speak only Spanish. However, over half the population is fluent in both languages.

Historically there were a large number of bilingual households from intermarriage. The Spanish elite was not isolated from masses; there were relatively few Spanish immigrants to tip the scales, likely due to the lack of exploitable resources to draw immigration.

The 17th century Jesuits promoted Guaraní literacy, and the language came to be identified with Paraguayan nationalism (against the larger Argentina and Brazil). It is a matter of nationality rather than ethnicity, since most modern Paraguayans are mestizo; there are not many unmixed Guaraní today.

Language identity in Paraguay

Speakers with more than one language at their disposal often use them in particular situations, and they come to have corresponding associations. The two major languages of Paraguay have associations partly as a result of the historical circumstances under which Spanish was introduced.

Language choice in Paraguay

Related to these associations, a bilingual will choose one language or the other based on the circumstance.

Paraguayans use the term gringo to refer to monolingual Spanish speakers.

Pascua

The Barber article discusses the use of three different languages in the Yaqui (or Yoeme) community of Pascua, Arizona. Other Yaqui communities are in the Mexican state of Sonora.

Men in Old Pascua with the anthropologists Edward and Rosamond Spicer (ca. 1938)

Barber's descriptions are mostly from 1950-51, with a focus on younger men as the most trilingual members of the community. It was at least somewhat stable rather than purely transitional, since the facts were basically the same in the 1970s, though more people knew English better by then.

Barber must be speaking of "Old Pascua", in the northwest part of Tucson, rather than "New Pascua", the site of the modern reservation in southwest Tucson, officially recognized in 1978.

Trilingualism in Pascua

As in Paraguay, the languages available in Pascua have particular associations and spheres of use.

• Yaqui
  • familial, informal (to older people), formal-ceremonial
  • expresses Yaqui cultural and religious identity, which is not always desired
• Spanish
  • familial, informal (to younger people), formal-Catholic, recreational
  • expresses allegiance to Mexican community; associated with friendships
• English
  • mostly formal, educational/literacy, economic, legal, military
  • often associated with subordinate status, but also friendships and romance (e.g. O’odham people)
  • access to larger culture/country, mobility, economic opportunity

Tok Pisin: from pidgin to creole

In the right situation, we can find the spontaneous creation of a new language. The languages that are created resemble other languages in fundamental ways, which is not expected without some kind of innate structure. In certain situations of language contact, a pidgin language may arise to serve as a lingua franca or means of communication among people who don't share a common language. A pidgin is not a fully developed language: it has no native speakers, and its grammar is quite simple.

An example is an earlier form of Tok Pisin ("talk pidgin") which arose in Papua New Guinea: a simplified form of English influenced by native languages of the island. This quote (written in normal English spelling) is from the 19th century; the now-obscure verb gammon means "to deceive".

Boatswain gammon me.
"The boatswain lied to me."

Today, that sentence be expressed the following way (with phonetic spelling as well as different grammar).

Bosun i giaman-im mi.
"The boatswain lied to me."

What happened? Sometimes a pidgin can come to serve as the first language of children born into the contact situation. What happens in this case is creolization: the pidgin develops rapidly from the simple pidgin to a much more complex creole, a true language. It seems that the children are imposing their innate linguistic skills on the impoverished input and coming up with a language worthy of their language instinct.

Creolization and verb agreement

In the course of the 20th century, Tok Pisin has developed far greater complexity in a number of ways. One is that verbs take a subject or predicate marking element i even in the presence of a full noun phrase (unlike in usual English).

Wanpela man i no kam.
"One person didn't come."

Ol man i wok.
"The men were/are working."

Similarly, verbs take a suffix im (from English "him") when they are transitive (i.e. have a direct object), but it's always there, not just when English would use "him".

Ol man i wok-im kaikai.
"The men were/are preparing food."

Thus new forms of verb agreement have been introduced by the children. This grammar has developed in its own way, based on the children's creativity and natural linguistic ability, and is not simply moving toward the English model. Scholars debate the degree to which the new grammar derives from neighboring languages or from innate human grammar, but either way it shows the effect of the human inclination for systematic, grammatical language.

See a page written in Tok Pisin, with many examples of i and -im, and another page with more information and links.

Delaware Jargon

In North America we find various pidgin languages, none of which seem to have developed into a creole — unlike the mixed languages discussed last time, which do have native speakers.

Delaware Jargon is a pidgin language that developed during contact with Europeans in the Mid Atlantic region. The initial contact was with the Dutch, later the Swedish and the English. It was most widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries; later, simplified or pidgin English was used in communication between Anglos and Native Americans.

The Delaware language, in the two main dialects Munsee (to the north) and Unami (to the south), was spoken from Delaware to New York, including the Philadelphia region. The native term is Lenape, literally "real (len-) people (-a:pe:)".

Delaware Jargon numbers

It can be seen from this comparison that the Unami language is the basis of the jargon, since that variety matches the recorded number words for the jargon. This reflects early Dutch settlement along the Delaware in this region before moving north to New Amsterdam, as well as Swedish settlement in this area.

Although the 17th-century transcriptions are not easy to interpret precisely, for several numbers (5, 9, 10, and even 1, 6) they clearly represent words based on an Unami rather than a Munsee source.

It can also be noted that the Delaware numbering system is partly quinary (cf. 1:6, 2:7, 3:8).

Delaware Jargon vocabulary

In many cases the vocabulary is simplified or otherwise altered from the source meaning. These Jargon transcriptions reflect modern interpretations of older unsophisticated spellings.

Delaware Jargon negation

The complexities of Algonquian verb morphology are absent from the jargon, which relies instead on periphrasis.

Delaware Jargon "have"

Although Unami does not express "have" and "there is" in the same way as the ordinary verbs just shown, the jargon uses the same resources for these meanings as for other verbs.

This is another way in which the grammar is simplified.

Chinook Jargon

Chinook Jargon (or Chinook Wawa) is a pidgin language that developed along the Columbia River that divides Washington and Oregon. From there it spread to adjacent regions in the Pacific Northwest. Some regional variation developed, depending on the local languages that influenced the Jargon.

It was widely used among different Native American groups and white traders and settlers, especially in the 19th century. For example, Alsea speakers who moved to the Siletz Reservation on the northern Oregon coast used Chinook Jargon to communicate with other Indians.

There is controversy about whether the Jargon came about as the result of contact with Europeans, or existed already as a trade language but later incorporated European elements.

Chinook Jargon – native vocabulary

Although pidgin languages are often associated with "simpler" pronunciations, this may partly be due to the fact that the most famous of these languages developed among speakers of languages that happened to have fairly simple syllable structure. In the Northwest, complex consonants and syllables are common, and this is reflected in the Jargon. These words originate in indigenous languages.

Most of the vocabulary is from Chinook, Nootka, and Coast Salish.

Chinook Jargon – European vocabulary

These words come from English and French, in some cases with changes in meaning.

Chinook Jargon sentences

Here you can see some examples of full sentences in Chinook Jargon, which include some of the vocabulary just presented.

‘a coyote and a wolf lived (with) their houses side by side’

‘thus the coyote spoke to the wolf’

‘one man went to the mountain’

Notice that the 3pl morpheme marks both the subject and the possessor, a free-standing pronoun rather than the affixal morphology typical of the region. The subject does not consistently precede or follow the verb, i.e. there is some freedom of word order; perhaps "coyote" comes later in the second sentence because it is old information.

Chinook Jargon pronouns

In these examples, you can see more uses of the pronouns which, as is typical in a pidgin, are used very flexibly. Note also that limited resources are exploited for imperatives and even to express the notion "thirst".

‘you won’t (have to) wait for me’

‘go!’, ‘you should go’

‘the young woman’s relatives’

‘I am very thirsty’

Nicaraguan Sign Language

Signed languages are visual-spatial languages used as the primary means of communication by communities of Deaf people in various parts of the world. The Ethnologue index lists 121 Deaf Sign Languages throughout the world. Like any other language, a sign language requires a language community to develop or to be maintained. In many traditional societies, where deaf people live out their lives in the small communities in which they are born, there is not the "critical mass" of signers needed to create a true sign language. Instead, each deaf person develops an ad hoc sort of pidgin sign language to use with his or her relatives and neighbors.

Over the past few decades, a creolized sign language has developed out of pidgin signs that had been independently developed by isolated deaf children and adults in Nicaragua.

In schools for the deaf, children invented a system of communication where none had existed before; it was a (signed) pidgin. Like other pidgins, the signed pidgin in Nicaragua had relatively little grammatical structure and systematicity. Children who were brought into this environment at a young age learned something different: a fully formed language, in effect, a language created from the fragmentary input of the pidgin.

In 1977, a centralized school brought together deaf children who shared their signs and began to create a new language. By 1983, more than 400 deaf children were in these specialized schools. Since that time, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) has rapidly moved toward a full grammatical system.

Once a community is established, the grammar of the sign language can develop rapidly, as in the case of NSL. This is the presumed history of every sign language, though usually we have little record of the origins. Similar observations have recently been made for a community in Israel using Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.

Gesture vs. Signing

The differences are particularly striking when we compare a non-signer with a child who has learned the creolized sign language. Contrast the gestures in telling a story about "a cat [who], having swallowed a bowling ball, proceeds rapidly down a steep street in a wobbling, rolling manner". Click on the photos to see corresponding videos.

Iconic gesture		Manner + Path
This Spanish speaker traces the movement quite directly. The motion is iconic, mimicking the observed facts while saying y va corriendo corriendo "and it goes running running". This was characteristic of the signers who first arrived at the school.		This deaf signer, in the third generation of children at the school, breaks the description into two elements: the wobbling or rolling manner and the path it follows down the street.

Linguistic decomposition

The discrete gestures of the signer are much more similar to spoken language than the iconic gesture of the Spanish speaker, because spoken languages usually encode path and manner separately, e.g. one part in the verb and one part in another phrase.

In English, the manner is normally in the verb and the path is in a particle or adverb:

The cat rolled down (the street).

In Spanish, the path is in the verb and the manner is added as a participle:

El gato cayó rodando (calle abajo).
the cat fell-down rolling (street downward)

The important fact is that these two things are separate linguistic elements, in all these languages as well as in Nicaraguan Sign Language. The iconic gestures that can accompany spoken language do not have this property — even when the concurrent language (Spanish) does split the elements.

Plains Sign Language

A rather different lingua franca was a sign language found in the Plains. We have no evidence that it originated in a small community of deaf people as in Nicaragua and elsewhere, but it similarly represents the creation of a new form of communication. However, this sign language remained a pidgin as far as we know, without any native speakers.

In this map, the Plains culture area is highlighted in yellow. Tribes known to use the sign language are underlined.

This gestural language existed before European contact, since it was observed by Coronado when the Spanish first encountered Indians in the southern Plains in 1541–42.

The system must have originated in a region with many mutually unintelligible languages. Because it is known that the sign language spread from the south to the north, a possible site of origin is the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas, which was linguistically very diverse (Taylor 1978: 225).

Plains Sign Language abstraction

As in other sign languages, articulations are restricted to the hands, and generally to a fairly limited set of handshapes. This distinguishes the means of communication from pantomime, where the entire body would be used to evoke various things or activities. Notice, for example, that DANCE and ASTRIDE use the hands to stand for the body, and movement to a place uses abstract reference to "here" and "there".

This is true despite the fact that many of the signs are quite iconic; the point is that they are permitted to be iconic only within the restricted possibilities of hand-oriented signs.

Plains Sign Language sentences

Here are some examples of simple sentences in the sign language.

The sentence that is literally "longtime-see-not" may be the source of the colloquialism long time no see.

However, another possible source is Chinese Pidgin English, based on a Chinese expression such as Mandarin 很久不見 hěn jiǔ bù jiàn "very-(long)time-not-see" or Cantonese 好耐冇見 hou2 noi6 mou5 gin3 "good-patient-not-see".

Plains Sign Language conference

Hugh L. Scott (1853–1934) was a cavalry officer who learned to use Plains Sign Language when he was involved in campaigns against the Plains Indians in the late 19th century. After his retirement (having reached the rank of Major General in a long career), he organized a conference in September 1930, at Fort Browning, Montana, for the purpose of filming the sign language before knowledge of it was lost.

This video shows brief introductions by people in attendance.

Here is a story told by Tom White Horse, an Arapaho from Wyoming, The basic meaning is that white people communicate across distances by telegraph wires, while Indians communicate by dreams. Here is the same narrative, but with subtitles giving the literal translations of the signs (added by Tommy Foley).

A site with various videos is http://pislresearch.com/videos.html.