The Open Atlas Blog

There's a linguistic trend going on in the Americas. Generally speaking the language of the colonizers has been and continues to be the main language of the state while indigenous languages have been spoken by much smaller and more geographically isolated groups. Again this the trend, not the rule, but you if you look at the official languages from Canada to Chile you'll notice a certain pattern. Paraguay, however is an exception to the general linguistics trends. While Spanish became an extremely important language (spoken by more than 90% of the population), it did not supplant native tongues so thoroughly as happened in other countries. Today, Paraguay has two official languages - Spanish and Guarani, both of which are enshrined in the country's constitution. This made Guarani the first Amerindian language to attain the status of a country's official language. Today other indigenous languages are recognised and named as official in South American by co...