The Guarani language (still) alive in Brazil: the original culture that colonization was unable to eliminate

Abstract

Brazil presents itself to the world by means of a single language, Portuguese. This fact hides the data raised by the IBGE’s 2010 census: the existence of 274 different languages, according to the respondents’ spontaneous answers. Thus, Brazil cannot be considered a monolingual country. Once called Pindoráma by the Guarani, Brazil’s main language used to be an original language mixed with Portuguese (the General Language). However, in 1757, under the influence of the Marquis of Pombal, the Portuguese government issued a decree that banned the use of that language. This paper aims to demonstrate that, despite the language ban, in the historical context of colonization, the Guarani language remains alive in today's Brazilian Portuguese. In order to do so, we refer to grammars and dictionaries from past centuries and compare them with what would correspond to today's indigenous language. Through the lexical study of Portuguese, grammatical expressions, names of rivers, and some localities in the city of São Paulo have been enumerated to finally exemplify how some Brazilian states’ names also originated from the same language family. Thus, we conclude that despite the linguistic-cultural ethnocide, and even if denied by the official language, the Guarani language in Brazil has been keeping its original culture alive, which constitutes a fundamental reason to value the surviving human beings who, even today, speak that same language.