“Guarani is a pentagram”. Artifices and oscillations of Guaraní philology in Paraguay at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

The study of the Guaraní language from a philological perspective grew up between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. In our opinion, scholarly interest in this language responded to a specific situation where the predominance of positivism allowed new linguistic and literary approaches, but sought give Guarani a positive value that would contradict the label of “language of barbarians” that weighed on it. However, the process of reconstructing the national prestige of the language went through different problems related to writing and spelling norms. The aim of this article is to analyze some episodes and intellectual roles that comprised the new interest in Guarani as an object of study, and which served as a counterforce for the emergence of a national writing and literature in the non-indigenous Guarani language during the first decades of the twentieth century. In this analysis we will relate a series of texts of various origins that we will approach from the perspective of Latin American Cultural Studies. This perspective will help us to understand what processes, representations and ideologies about community, language and history come into tension with regard to the language question.