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Essay on Languages of Latin America by Geographic Regions
Guarani
Guarani is indigenous South American language of the Tupi-Guarani language family. The term can also refer to indigenous speakers of Guarani, who inhabit parts of Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia. Guarani is one of the official languages of Paraguay, where it is spoken by approximately 90 percent of the population.
Before the time of the Spanish conquest the Guarani people were widely scattered throughout the central and southern areas of South America. The tribes lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering plant foods. Their weapons were the bow and arrow and the club. They built homes of thatched huts around a central area or plaza. Handicrafts included pottery making, basketry, and weaving. They slept in netted hammocks woven on simple, upright looms (Kaufman, 1994b). Religion was very important, and their religious leaders, called shamans (see Shaman), had great power and influence. In the first half of the 16th century, the Spanish came to Guarani territory in search of gold. Jesuit missionaries who came later converted the Guarani to Christianity.
Most present-day Paraguayans have some Guarani ancestry. Descendants of the Guarani in Brazil dwell in villages surrounded with a double line of palisades; family life is communal. They engage in farming, hunting, and fishing.
Aymara
One of the main differences between Aymara and Spanish lies in the fact that Aymara sentences are not made up of words, but of strings of syllables linked together, i.e., a succession of suffixes added to a nucleus (Kaufman, 1994a). The grammatical function and meaning of these strings correspond to several words in Spanish (Sarah, 1996). For instance, the following string is a complete statement: "manqayarapiskatapawa" ("You would have been having him eat it") In this string, the nucleus is the verbal root "manqa", from the verb "manqaña" (to eat).............
