Sociolinguistic Aspects of Guaraní-Spanish Bilingualism and Paraguayan Language Policy in the Context of Inter-American Human Rights¹

by

Shaw N. Gynan, Western Washington University

Paraguay has been of interest to sociolinguists because of its unique situation of national bilingualism, but much less attention has been paid, outside of Paraguay, to the language policy that has been developed to manage Spanish and Guaraní. If the situation of language contact itself is worthy of attention, surely official reaction to these two languages merits analysis. The macro-sociolinguistic perspective provided by linguistic demography is particularly useful for this examination of the important events in language planning that have occurred in Paraguay.

The standard against which Paraguay’s language policy is measured here is the "Proposed American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples," drafted in 1996 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a principal organ of the Organization of American States (OAS). Paraguay’s response to the challenge of multilingualism has been mainly through the Paraguayan Ministerio de Educación y Culto (MEC), which has produced a considerable number of policy documents and demographic analyses. This information, along with language data from Paraguay’s census bureau, on-site visits by the author to elementary schools throughout the country, and interviews with individuals directly involved in language policy, is used to assess the kind of language planning that has emerged and the demographic dimensions of Paraguay’s bilingualism.

The application of the OAS draft standard to the situation of Guaraní is not straightforward. The provisions of the declaration are applied to those peoples who self-identify as indigenous (OAS 1997:635). Although Guaraní is indisputably an indigenous language with such non-Romance characteristics as post-positions and morphological, as opposed to intonational interrogative markers, speakers of Guaraní are not classified by the government as indigenous. MEC (Paraguay 1994c:5) argues that Paraguayan Guaraní is distinct from ethnic Guaraní, dialects of which are still spoken by peoples who live in traditional tribal societies and keep alive numerous aspects of their autochthonous culture. Service (1954) argues that acculturation of the Guaraní was accomplished during the colonial period before the end of the sixteenth century. Melià (1992:107) documents the europeanization and christianization of the Guaraní by Franciscans and Jesuits. Whether the OAS standard would apply to the case of Paraguayan Guaraní is therefore in reasonable doubt.

The IACHR declaration includes significant statements on language rights consonant with those in Unesco’s historic 1953 declaration on vernacular literacy education. Although the IACHR declaration was made subsequent to the policy documents analyzed here, the Unesco document, referred to by Paraguayan language planners (Paraguay 1991:25), establishes as axiomatic that the best medium for teaching a child literacy in her or his mother tongue (Unesco 1953:11). The IACHR declares that indigenous peoples have the right to use their languages (OAS 1997:635), and are to be free from forced assimilation. The states must recognize and respect indigenous use of languages, and are called upon to support indigenous language television broadcasting and the creation of indigenous radio stations. Specifically, in "areas where indigenous languages are predominant, states shall endeavor to establish the pertinent languages as official languages and to give them the same status that is given to non-indigenous official languages" (OAS 1997:637). The IACHR declaration also provides important support for indigenous and bilingual literacy programs: "When indigenous peoples so decide, educational systems shall be conducted in the indigenous languages and incorporate indigenous context, and they shall also be provided with the necessary training and means for complete mastery of the official language or languages" (OAS 1997:638). Finally, in Article IX, the states are called upon to take measures to guarantee access to education at all levels at least equal in quality to that of the general population (OAS 1997:638).

In 1992, well before the publication of the OAS declaration, and shortly following the fall of Stroessner’s 35 year dictatorship, Paraguay’s government declared Guaraní an official language of Paraguay for the first time (Paraguay 1994c:20, 29). What has emerged since is a proposal for full-fledged mother-tongue literacy and bilingual education (Paraguay 1995a). The initial plan, first presented in 1991, called for a completely balanced two-way system in which each Paraguayan child would be trained in literacy in his or her own language, with the second language being taught 15% of the time in first grade and increasing by 5% a year until total parity was reached in the 9th grade. The program was initiated in March of 1994 (fall semester) with 118 schools (Paraguay 1994b). In November of that same year, the National Bilingualism Commission, was created by presidential decree and charged with developing language policy for the country (Paraguay 1994a).

MEC (Paraguay 1994b) reports that the new bilingual program required the training of 174 teachers and involved 7,058 children, a ratio of one trained teacher for about 40 children. According to MEC figures, in 1994, 1,568 schools reported being essentially monolingual in Guaraní, and of those 1,098 requested inclusion in the Guaraní modality. MEC figures show that the demand by schools for Guaraní literacy education represented 35,425 students of a total of 45,470 identified as attending schools in which the student population was entirely monolingual in Guaraní. The 1,098 schools were allowed to implement the Guaraní program without Guaraní materials in what was termed "cobertura blanda." The locations of the 118 programs by department are shown on the map in Figure 1.

Despite the modest size of this initial project, several challenges emerged. A newspaper report (ABC 1994:37) detailed internal MEC opposition to expansion of the program, citing lack of evaluation, budget, and texts. Parental opposition to Guaraní literacy education had been anticipated, but despite the implementation of a massive program of sensibilización of over 10,000 parents of children attending programs in the 118 schools (Paraguay 1994d), parental opposition to the Guaraní modality was cited by MEC (Paraguay 1995b:3) as a justification for a significant modification of the diseño único, suggesting one referred to by critics as a diseño diferencial. The technical team pointed out that with this new plan, MEC was "turning its back on the sociolinguistic reality of the country" (Paraguay 1995c:24).

The technical team notes that the proposed changes, which would affect the third through sixth grades, would produce an especially abrupt transition from third to fourth grade. Whereas following the original balanced design, after a 75%/35% Guaraní/Spanish third year program, Guaraní-speaking children would receive 70% mother tongue instruction and 30% in Spanish during the fourth year, with the new plan those children would receive 33.5% in their native language and 66.5% in Spanish, effectively reversing the originally proposed proportions of Guaraní and Spanish instruction (Paraguay 1995c:7-15). This move, along with a reversal of percentages for native Spanish speakers, who in the fourth grade would receive 68.5% of their instruction in Spanish and the balance in Guaraní, amounted to reformulating the proposed program from two-way maintenance to transitional bilingual education.

How well did these proposals meet the needs of Paraguayans involved with the school system? Did MEC identify accurately the scope of the task facing the nation? A beginning of an answer to these questions can be found within the data banks of the Paraguayan census of 1992, but not without some digging. Paraguay, in 1992 as it has for the last 40 years, included on its census form a question about language. Specifically, households were identified as being monolingual in one of three languages, Spanish, Portuguese, or Guaraní, bilingual in Spanish and Guaraní, or speakers of other languages. The published report of the census was divided into two sections, one on household information (e.g., detailed data on the type of dwelling and language), and one on population (which included details on individuals such as sex, age, literacy, education, and economic activity). What this meant, most unfortunately for those who would desire the very detailed information on education broken down by language, was that none other than cross tabulations of dwelling type by language was available.

In response to this situation, the author of this study submitted a proposal to the census bureau to rerun the population analysis, identifying each individual by language of household and then cross-tabulating with the detailed demographic data. The resulting report was produced as thirty megabytes of computer files. This analysis is based on two tables from that study (Paraguay 1995d; 1995e). One (Paraguay 1995d) contains population counts for area, sex, literacy, schooling, and economic activity for five language categories in approximately 200 census districts divided among 18 departmental groupings. This array, containing roughly 16,000 cells of population counts, had to be transformed into one in which a single column contained all numerical counts and the other 6 columns categorical data in character form. The second table (Paraguay 1995e), containing far more detailed data on educational attainment by age and department, was consulted briefly for this study.

Transposition and transformation of the data were essential for further analysis and allowed for tests of independence to determine the ways in which language and demographic variables interact. Standardization of the data, a procedure necessary for comparison of counts in different categories also allowed for the drawing of statistical maps, which facilitate greatly the development of a dialect geography of Paraguay, showing relative rates of differential language use across the country.² The macro-sociolinguistic profile that emerges from this analysis allows us to place the challenge of bilingualism to language policy formulation in proper perspective, but in the final analysis, simple counts by language detail most clearly just how far Paraguay has gone in providing for the language rights of its Guaraní-speaking citizens.

In the bottom row of Table 1, we see the distribution of population by language with which most students of Paraguayan bilingualism are familiar. By adding bilinguals and Guaraní or Spanish speakers, we find that over 88% speak Guaraní, whereas only 45% speak Spanish. Even these simple statistics have been badly misinterpreted, and not by Joan Rubin (1962:52, 1968:14), but rather by Joshua Fishman (1967:2), who in his well-known article on bilingualism with or without diglossia, declared that nearly the entire population was bilingual. Englebrecht and Ortiz (1983:54) committed precisely this same mistake years later.

The proportional distribution of languages at the national level is not found in individual departments. The significant chi-square figure indicates that these two categories interact. One way in which they interact is very clear in Table 1. Simply put, some departments, such as San Pedro, are predominantly monolingual in Guaraní, others, such as Central and Asunción, are predominantly bilingual, and even Portuguese has made significant inroads in certain eastern census districts. The division of Paraguay into departments has been provided for reference in Figure 1, but while departments are convenient units for the development of a sociolinguistic profile, they obscure the complexity of geographical patterns of distribution. For this reason, in the other maps developed by the author for this study, distribution of language use is shown by census district rather than by department. As the reader examines the maps of distribution of language use, she or he should keep in mind that the Chaco provinces of Boquerón, Alto Paraguay, and Presidente Hayes, all to the west of the Rio Paraguay, represent a mere 3% of the population of the country. The Chaco census districts are very large as well, so one must be careful not to form the impression that speakers of any category are spread evenly throughout this vast, largely inhospitable and sparsely settled area. The census districts of the east, on the other hand, are far smaller and enable for a more detailed and sensitive picture of the distribution of language.

Focussing on the close-up view of Asunción and Central Department in Figure 2, note that even as one leaves the capital of Asunción and enters the outer edges of Central Department, the incidence of Guaraní monolingualism escalates very considerably, and does not diminish until one approaches Brazil to the east or Argentina to the south. The distribution of bilinguals shown graphically in Figure 3 should dispel once and for all, even if figures do not, the misconception that the country is largely bilingual. Exactly where rates of Guaraní monolingualism are low, bilingualism is high. High rates of bilingualism are confined to urban areas, with extremely low rates predominating in la campaña. As the close-up of Asunción and Central Department in Figure 3 shows, while the capital and surrounding cities are very heavily bilingual, the rate of bilingualism drops off notably as one approaches the borders of Central Department. We revisit the importance of the rural-urban dimension in our discussion of the data in Table 2. As for Spanish speakers, a national map of departments or census districts is of little use, since, as Table 1 indicates, the incidence of Spanish monolingualism throughout Paraguay is very low. Only in Asunción does the rate of Spanish monolingualism exceed 20%. These data demonstrate the importance of geographical distance as a sociolinguistic factor, documented by Bills, Hernández-Chávez and Hudson (1992), although here distance is better related to language spread than to language maintenance. Mention should also be made of Portuguese, monolingualism in which surpasses that in Spanish throughout several census districts bordering on Brazil.

We have noted the importance of the rural-urban dimension, which is well known to students of this situation. The figures in Table 2 show how this factor interacts with language. Noting the totals, which indicate that the population is divided roughly 50-50 rural-urban, this ratio is not seen among any of the language sub-populations. Indeed, whereas speakers of Guaraní, Portuguese, and other languages in their vast majority live in the countryside, equally high majorities of bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals are confined to the cities. These relationships obtain even in the tiniest census districts, where urban areas always have some bilinguals if not Spanish speakers.

Much has been made about the relationship between gender and language, data for which are provided in Table 3. Using language as a stratificational variable, we can test the independence of the rural-urban and female-male binary variables. The factors indeed are not independent, as the Mantel Haenszel chi square indicates (Systat 1992b:585). There are more women in the city and more men in the country. This interaction obtains regardless of language, but since we have already seen that language interacts with the rural-urban dimension, the area-sex interaction is diminished in the case of Guaraní, enhanced in the case of bilingualism, and notably increased in the case of urban Spanish, where females speak Spanish-only at a rate 20% higher than males.

Women are often blamed for being at the cutting edge of assimilation, and the census data confirm a frequently given explanation: jobs. As shown in Table 4, sex and employment indeed interact. While the population of males and females is divided roughly 50-50, distribution of sex by employment is not at all predictable from these data. Instead, most men are employed and most women are not. This relationship obtains across languages, but language either diminishes or enhances the interaction. The most stark contrast is seen between Spanish and Guaraní. In the case of Spanish, 44.26% of women work, twice the national rate, while the rate of employment for males is only 76.28%, the lowest for any of the language sub-populations. The rate of employment for Guaraní-speaking males, on the other hand, is 81.84%, whereas not even nine percent of Guaraní-speaking women are employed. Recall that language and area interact. Men find work in la campaña. Rates of employment for men are noticeably lower in urban areas contiguous to Asunción and Central Department. Work in the sector agropecuario results in far higher rural rates of employment. The situation of men contrasts impressively with that of women, who do find work at modest levels in the widely dispersed urban areas.

Now that we have painted a "demolinguistic" portrait of Guaraní, let’s examine how education fares. One measure of importance is literacy, precisely because it is defined as being at least ten years old and having completed second grade, a modest standard at best, considering the vast number of monolingual Guaraní speakers who are educated by means of nothing more than submersion, that is, literacy instruction in Spanish, which is in many respects a foreign and largely incomprehensible language. As Table 5 illustrates, literacy interacts with the urban sector. The column percents at the bottom of the page show that while this sub-population is divided rural-urban 46.10% to 53.90%, this ratio does not predict the actual distribution of literate and illiterate people by area. Two-thirds of illiterate people live in the rural sector, and only 43.78% of literate people live in that sector. This significant interaction holds across all languages, but again is influenced by them. Bilinguals and Spanish speakers show roughly the same levels of literacy and illiteracy, while illiteracy in Guaraní is twice as high as in bilinguals and Spanish speakers. The rate of illiteracy in Portuguese is 400 percent that of Spanish and bilinguals.

The relationship between language and school attendance is clearly shown in Table 6. The column percents in the bottom rows are provided to illustrate the significant interaction between literacy and area. Whereas there are more children in the rural sector, proportionately fewer attend school, and proportionately many more fail to attend school. Since there are more monolingual Guaraní children in the rural sector, their rates of attendance are correspondingly lower. There are 382,873 monolingual Guaraní children between the ages of 7 and 14. Of these, 67,353 are not in school. While MEC figures on the numbers of children in school prove to be in close agreement with census data, they do not account for the children that are not attending. Other agencies have also underestimated the extent of Guaraní monolingualism among children. For example, the International Development Bank vastly underestimates the percentage of Guaraní monolingual children in the rural sector at 30% (IDB 1993: 7), when census figures indicate that in the rural sector, of 475,244 children, two-thirds, or 321,983, are being raised in Guaraní only (see Table 6). In other words, 67.8% of rural, school-age children are monolingual in Guaraní. Another underestimation of monolingualism is found in a recent MEC document, where it is reported that "it has been shown that the Paraguayan linguistic phenomenon, rather than being a dichotomized reality-Guaraní monolingualism versus Spanish monolingualism-, is better described as a communicative continuum, at the extremes of which there are absolute cases of monolingualism only in very small numbers, and with a clear tendency towards disappearance in the case of Guaraní monolingualism (and conversely an increase in the case of Spanish monolingualism) (MEC 1998 : 15). This is a widely held opinion and one which the analysis of census data simply does not support (see Gynan 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). On the contrary, there is every indication that monolingualism in Guaraní was on the increase in the most rural zones from 1982 to 1992. Granted, these tendencies will no doubt have changed as a consequence of political upheaval and economic crisis following the fall of Stroessner in 1989, events that have reportedly lead to significant migration by impoverished peasants to interior rural sectors and which would reasonably increase the frequency of contact with Spanish.

Is Paraguay meeting the needs of its Guaraní-speaking citizens as defined by the OAS? The language policies created certainly aim toward that end, but the sociolinguistic reality of the country makes implementation difficult. The work for which most Guaraní-speaking males are qualified is in the countryside, where the school system is still being developed. Indeed, for reasons of ease of access, the 118 schools that were chosen to begin the Guaraní literacy program were located not in heavily monolingual areas but instead in bilingual sectors. Despite the enormous challenges, Paraguay’s language policy is as bold as the IACHR statement. There is very likely no other indigenous language in the Americas that has such a bright future as Guaraní (including other indigenous languages of Paraguay, which are discussed at length in Paraguayan language policy documents but not examined here). The National Bilingualism Commission, at least as it was constituted in 1995-96, was unanimously and unequivocally in support of saving Guaraní. Demographics are promising as well. We have omitted mention of the age factor, not included in the census tables under analysis, but if the reader compares the right hand column percents for literacy and school in Tables 5 and 6, respectively, she or he will note that distribution figures for the general sub-population by area are roughly reversed. In Table 5, 46.10% of the population lives in the rural sector and 53.90% is urban, whereas in Table 6 54.31% of the population is rural and only 45.69% is urban. That is because Table 5 figures are for persons 15 and older and Table 6 figures are for persons from 7 to 14. The rural birthrate is higher than that of the urban population. This trend and higher rates of employment for Guaraní men favor maintenance of this language for the foreseeable future, and lend even more urgency to the task of appropriate literacy education.

NOTES