Official languages Spanish, Guaraní | Main immigrant languages Portuguese | |
Sign languages Paraguayan Sign Language | ||
The Republic of Paraguay is a mostly bilingual country, where both Spanish, an Indo-European language, and Guaraní, an indigenous language of the Tupian family, have official status.
Contents
Spanish and Guaraní
Spanish is spoken by about 87% of the population, while Guaraní is spoken by more than 90%, with about 4,650,000 speakers. 52% of rural Paraguayans are monolingual in Guaraní. 73% of the population is bilingual in both languages, while only 27% is monolingual either in Spanish or in Guaraní.
Guaraní is the only indigenous language of the Americas whose speakers include a large proportion of non-indigenous people. This is an anomaly in the Americas where language shift towards European colonial languages (in this case, the other official language of Spanish) has otherwise been a nearly universal cultural and identity marker of mestizos (people of mixed Spanish and Amerindian ancestry), and also of culturally assimilated, upwardly-mobile Amerindian people.
Other languages
About 50,000 Paraguayans speak an indigenous language besides Guaraní:
Besides Spanish, Guaraní and all other previous languages, Portuguese, Plautdietsch, Standard German and Italian are spoken as well.