Sanapaná People
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The Sanapana are one of many nomadic tribes inhabiting the lower
Gran Chaco The Gran Chaco or Dry Chaco is a sparsely populated, hot and semiarid lowland natural region of the Río de la Plata basin, divided among eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, northern Argentina, and a portion of the Brazilian states of Mato Gro ...
of western
Paraguay Paraguay (; ), officially the Republic of Paraguay ( es, República del Paraguay, links=no; gn, Tavakuairetã Paraguái, links=si), is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to th ...
. With the introduction of
Mennonite Mennonites are groups of Anabaptist Christian church communities of denominations. The name is derived from the founder of the movement, Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland. Through his writings about Reformed Christianity during the Radic ...
settlements in the central Chaco in the 1930s, many nomadic tribes semi-settled near the Mennonites. The Mennonites established Missions to many of these tribes, often grouping linguistically similar tribes nearby. The Sanapana and Lengua were settled on La Esperanza mission, southeast of Filadelfia, just off the
Pan-American Highway The Pan-American Highway (french: (Auto)route panaméricaine/transaméricaine; pt, Rodovia/Auto-estrada Pan-americana; es, Autopista/Carretera/Ruta Panamericana) is a network of roads stretching across the Americas and measuring about in to ...
. The Lengua, in their tongue, refer to themselves as "Enhlit," which means "the people." The Sanapana refer to themselves as "Nenhlet," which also means "the people." A standard conversation among the Sanapana-Lengua often includes words from their language, mixed with Spanish and Guaraní, the national languages of Paraguay, and some
Low German : : : : : (70,000) (30,000) (8,000) , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = West Germanic , fam4 = North Sea Germanic , ancestor = Old Saxon , ancestor2 = Middle L ...
, the primary language of the Mennonites. The Sanapana language uses the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
, a sample of which is "Tamilachlech coo evalhoc, Jesucristo singmasma coo." Indigenous peoples in Paraguay Indigenous peoples of the Gran Chaco {{SouthAm-ethno-group-stub