Discurso político y cambio de código: la alternancia guaraní / español en el discurso de Fernando Lugo [Political discourse and code switching: the alternation between Guarani and Spanish in Fernando Lugo’s public speech]

Abstract

In this article we analyze the alternation between Guarani and Spanish in the public speech of Paraguayan Ex-President Fernando Lugo. To do this, we first describe some historical and present features of bilingualism in Paraguay. Second, we review current literature on codeswitching to clarify in what sense we understand it: not as an alternation between grammatical systems but between symbolic representations of languages. The analysis of the corpus is divided into two sections, following the emergence of Guarani in predominantly Spanish texts or vice versa. The analysis shows a distribution that bonds Guarani with the semantic field of affections and intimacy while Spanish emerges as the language of public rationality. These results raise questions about the future implications of Paraguayan bilingual political discourse, especially with regard to the political instability in the country.