The Guarani Language Has Its First Dictionary in Paraguay

The Guarani Language Academy approved the first dictionary of this pre-Columbian language whose use is oficial and widely disseminated in Paraguay.

RELATED:

Paraguay: Students Demand Universal Access To Higher Education

As the Secretariat for Language Policies (SPL) explained, this linguistic tool is a monolingual text with 2000 entries, each of which describes the Indigenous language from its own semantics.

Each entry has also grammatical marks and definitions that record the different meanings of a word with their respective usage statements.

The dictionary includes examples taken from the language’s written reference sources, which come from literary and academic fields.

It is therefore a work that represents a "very important step in the lexical-semantic studies of the language and lays the foundations for the elaboration of the general dictionary of the Guarani language," the SPL said.

The Guarani Language Academy's functions are to establish the Guarani alphabet, grammar, and dictionary. In October, it presented a Guarani-Spanish-English translator that can accommodate 3,200 entries with the audio record of each of the words.

Guarani is a language spoken in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The 2017 Household Survey showed that 90 percent of Paraguayans speak Guarani and 40 percent of the population over the age of five speaks it routinely at home.