How one South American country has held on to its Indigenous language | Stories of Resistance

The Real News Podcast · Jun 20, 2025 · 4m

If you walk down the street in Paraguay, you will hear people speaking Spanish, the official language of most of the countries of Latin America. But, particularly if you are in the countryside, you will also hear something else: Guaraní.

It’s one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the Americas; a mother tongue of roughly six and half million people. In particular, in Paraguay.

There, most Paraguayans speak Guaraní or a mixture of Guaraní and Spanish, regardless of whether or not they are Indigenous Guaraní, mestizo, or white. When Paraguay was invaded in the mid-1800s, Guaraní…