World Language Map

Where is Paraguayan Guaraní spoken?

Paraguayan Guaraní is a Tupian language, spoken in Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Paraguayan Guaraní is spoken

Paraguayan Guaraní is spoken in 3 countries: Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Paraguay80%6,018,040
Bolivia0.5%55,404
ArgentinaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Paraguayan Guaraní is drawn as an area from Figueira 1982 (Argentina). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18614195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Paraguayan Guaraní.

How many people speak Paraguayan Guaraní?

Wikidata gives about 4.9 million speakers (Ethnologue, 1995). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Paraguayan Guaraní sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Paraguayan Guaraní as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Tupian
  2. Eastern Tupian
  3. Maweti-Guarani
  4. Aweti-Guarani
  5. Tupi-Guarani
  6. Southern Tupi-Guarani
  7. Tupi-Guarani Subgroup I
  8. Tupi-Guarani Subgroup I.A
  9. Paraguay-Brazil Guarani
  10. Paraguayan Guaraní

Related languages

Other languages in the Paraguay-Brazil Guarani group:

More about Paraguayan Guaraní

Codes: ISO 639-3 gug, Glottolog para1311. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Paraguayan Guaraní

Where is Paraguayan Guaraní spoken?

Paraguayan Guaraní is spoken in Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. Unicode CLDR puts it at 80% of the population of Paraguay, which is about 6,018,040 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Figueira 1982 (Argentina).

How many people speak Paraguayan Guaraní?

Wikidata gives about 4.9 million speakers (Ethnologue, 1995). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Paraguayan Guaraní in?

Glottolog places Paraguayan Guaraní in the Tupian family, in the branch Eastern Tupian, Maweti-Guarani, Aweti-Guarani, Tupi-Guarani, Southern Tupi-Guarani, Tupi-Guarani Subgroup I, Tupi-Guarani Subgroup I.A and Paraguay-Brazil Guarani.

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