Paraguay speaks Guaraní as a language of the nation

Paraguay lies between Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil and has no coast of its own. Location alone does not explain the country. It is the state in which Guaraní did not remain the language of a minority.

The capital, Asunción, lies on the Paraguay River. The official languages are Spanish and Guaraní. The currency carries the same name as the language. 7,013,078 people live on 406,752 square kilometres. The area is that of a landlocked state between larger neighbours. Language is what makes this country more than the gap between Brazil and Argentina. Draw only the gap and you have the map. You do not yet have the state.

Guaraní is not a minority language

The constitution makes Spanish and Guaraní official together. That is not a symbolic line aimed only at indigenous communities. Guaraní is heard in daily life far beyond those communities, often mixed with Spanish in the form of speech called Jopará. The census does not list the language as a remnant on the margin. It lists a language spoken in the country. Describe Paraguay only in Spanish and you describe one official half and leave the other out.

This state therefore departs from the pattern in which a colonial language occupies the office and the older language retreats into the family. In Paraguay the older language sits in the office as well. Spanish remains the language of part of writing, of the neighbouring states, and of the city that speaks outward. Guaraní stays audible even where no one has an indigenous community in view. The republic did not decide to call only one of the two voices official.

In Paraguay, Guaraní is not folklore beside the state. It is one of the voices in which the state speaks officially.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Enclosed between larger neighbours

The land neighbours are Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. None of them is a small hem, and none of them lets Paraguay reach a sea. The state is enclosed because the larger territories around it occupy the coasts. Asunción lies on a river, not on an ocean harbour. That is the basic geopolitical form: a country whose way outward is always also the question of how to reach the water through the territory of others.

In the west lies the Chaco, toward the Bolivian border, dry and of a different economy from the east along the river. The war with Bolivia over this land fixed the western border in politics. It is not a line the terrain would have made obvious by itself. To the east and south, Brazil and Argentina press in as the large neighbours. Between them Paraguay is not a buffer without a content of its own. It is a state with a language that neither neighbour uses as a national language.

The rivers are the way to the sea

Asunción lies on the Paraguay River. Farther south that river meets the Paraná, and the Paraná leads to the Río de la Plata. For a landlocked state this is not a detour from a romantic textbook. It is the way to the sea that the country has without owning a coast. The thesis of enclosure is right for the land border. It is no longer complete once the water is read as well. The state ends at the border. The water does not.

On the Paraná stands Itaipú, a hydroelectric station that Paraguay runs together with Brazil. The large neighbour is not only a border here. It is a partner at the same dam. Paraguay remains the smaller part on a river it does not control alone, and at the same time a state that would be still more enclosed without that river. The currency recalls the language in its name. The geography recalls that this language carries a state which must share its way out.

Paraguay is the landlocked state that made Guaraní an official language of the nation and takes its way to the sea along rivers it shares with larger neighbours. The gap on the map is real. The language in that gap is the actual state.