Asunción, Agencia IP.- The Secretariat of Linguistic Policies (SPL) plans to create an audiovisual record of the most significant celebration among the Guarani people in the Chaco region, the Arete Guasu, which takes place simultaneously in four communities.
To achieve this, authorities from the SPL and the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (Mitic) have coordinated cooperation for broad coverage of the festivity.
«Arete Guasu is the best-known festival among the Western Guarani and serves as a primary preserver of their language,» stated the Minister of SPL, Javier Viveros.
The collaboration with Mitic aims to provide coverage of the four communities during the three days of this celebration, coinciding with the carnival.
This year, it will be celebrated from Saturday, February 10, to Monday, February 12, in the indigenous communities of Pedro Peña, San Agustín, Laguna, and Cristo Rey, in the Boquerón department.
Another point of collaboration with Mitic is the proposal for a television program by SPL on Paraguay TV to promote and disseminate the 19 indigenous languages of the country.
«We want to conduct interviews with representatives of different languages,» noted the Minister. He mentioned that communities like the Nivaclé already have a language academy, grammar, and dictionary. At the same time, SPL collaborates with other communities like the Qom to preserve their language.
Soon to be released is a trilingual Qom-Spanish-Guarani dictionary developed by Amadeus Benz, a linguist with over five decades of work with this community. This adds to previous preservation efforts, such as the endangered Guaná language dictionary.
The Head of SPL attended the meeting, as did the Deputy Minister of Communication from Mitic, Alejandra Duarte, and authorities from the Ministry.