Paraneña Culture & Language

Paraguayan culture is the product of a genuine and unusual fusion, and of long isolation.

Mission baroque

Guarani sculptors trained by Jesuit craftsmen produced a body of religious carving that is neither European nor indigenous but a distinct school: saints and angels in local wood and stone with softened faces and a particular sweetness, angels playing European instruments, and ornament that borrows from the forest. The museum at Santa Maria de Fe and the surviving pieces at the mission sites hold some of the finest.

The Paraguayan harp

A light diatonic harp with no pedals, played with the fingernails, brought by the missions and made entirely its own. It carries polca paraguaya, syncopated across two rhythms at once, and guarania, the slow melancholy form created by Jose Asuncion Flores in the 1920s.

Nanduti

Radial needle lace from Itagua, worked in circles on a frame — the name is Guarani for spiderweb — in white or vivid colours, and one of the most distinctive crafts in South America. Ao po’i embroidery from Yataity is the other.

Literature

Augusto Roa Bastos wrote the great Paraguayan novel from exile.

Printing in Guarani

The missions operated the first printing press in this part of South America, cast their own type and printed devotional works in Guarani in the early eighteenth century, with Guarani compositors doing the work. That act of writing the language down is a large part of why it survived as a majority tongue when every comparable indigenous language in the Americas did not.

Bottle dance

Women dance balancing a stack of bottles on the head, a genuine folk feat.

Spanish and Guarani are both official, and both are genuinely used.

Guarani is spoken by around nine in ten Paraguayans, including in cities and by people of entirely European descent. It is taught in schools, used in the media, and mixed with Spanish in everyday speech as jopara. A visitor who learns even a few words is treated noticeably better for it — it registers as respect for something Paraguayans are proud of.

English is rare outside upmarket hotels and younger urban Paraguayans. Some Spanish is close to essential.

Portuguese and German are spoken near the Brazilian border and in the farming colonies.

Useful Guarani: mba’eichapa for how are you, ipora for good, aguyje for thank you, and jajotopata for see you.