Paraguay's Secretariat of Language Policy is leading a project to create the first historical corpus of 18th-century Paraguayan Spanish. The initiative aims to gather and digitize one hundred documents produced between 1700 and 1800, offering free access to researchers and interested parties.
The work is coordinated by the secretariat's General Directorate of Linguistic Research, with advisory support from Spanish philologist José Luis Ramírez Luengo of Spain's National Research Council (CSIC), and researcher Estela Peralta de Aguayo from the Institute of Languages at the National University of Asunción (UNA).
The documents will be selected based on three criteria: chronology, geographic origin, and text type. Half of the texts will come from Asunción and the other half from towns in the interior, including letters, wills, inventories, court records, administrative reports, and ecclesiastical documents.
The materials will be obtained from national and international archives, such as the National Archive of Asunción, the National Library of Paraguay, and the General Archive of the Nation in Argentina. After selection, the texts will undergo paleographic transcription and philological editing, following international standards for linguistic corpora.
The project will allow for the study of phonetic, lexical, morphosyntactic, and language-contact evidence with Guarani and Portuguese, in addition to revealing social and cultural practices of the era. The initiative seeks to fill a gap in diachronic studies of Spanish in the region and to value Paraguay's documentary heritage.