Aspects of Dialectal Diversification of Guarani in Paraguay and Corrientes. Contact between Two Given Languages in Different Settings

Abstract

Our contribution presents some aspects of the linguistic variation between two Guarani dialects, one spoken in Paraguay and the other in the Province of Corrientes in Argentina. Both dialects have been strongly affected by language contact with Spanish since Colonial times, and nowadays they present a large number of phenomena attributed to this contact. However, the examples of variation in the Correntinean dialect cannot be attributed to the same reasons as the Paraguayan ones. In our opinion historical and sociolinguistic features peculiar to the Correntinean speech community explain this differential outcome. After characterizing the main linguistic and sociolinguistic differences between Guarani in Paraguay and Corrientes, we present five examples of linguistic variation and show to which extent they are systemic to internal language change or due to external sociolinguistic reasons. We conclude by comparing our results with other mixed languages in order to generalize our findings on an abstract level.