Justin Pinta
    Pinta, Justin

    Mississippi State University  Estados Unidos

     

    Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at Mississippi State University. He holds a master’s degree in Linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from Ohio State University. His main research interests include the resilience of minority languages, language transmission in ideologically hostile environments, and the grammatical outcomes of language contact in such environments. His specialization is the contact of Guarani with Spanish in the Argentine province of Corrientes.

     

    Lecture

    Minoritized Language Resilience and the Past, Present, and Future of Guarani in Corrientes, Argentina

     

    The Argentine province of Corrientes has been characterized by intense language contact for centuries, with Spanish being spoken alongside a variety of Guarani which is unique to the province. While larger population centers of Corrientes have seen widespread language shift to Spanish, Guarani has been retained throughout much of the provincial interior. Via a combination of analysis of the historical record and fieldwork in the province from 2017-2020, I provide an account of Guarani in Corrientes from historical, present-day, and future perspectives, characterizing it as a case of minority language resilience par excellence. Tracing various institutional policies, both national and provincial, and the impacts they have had on language ideologies and patterns of language use in the province, I show that despite centuries of institutional and ideological pressure, Guarani has persisted in Corrientes, being spoken as the primary, and often only, language of the home in families in rural areas throughout the northcentral region of the province. The future of the language is bound up with the success of the current efforts to legitimize the language via educational implementation throughout the province, and the extent to which local economic factors encourage migration away from the rural provincial interior.