Aymara (; also ) is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over one million speakers.The other native American languages with more than one million speakers are Nahuatl, Quechua languages, and Guaraní. Aymara, along with Spanish and Quechua, is an official language in Bolivia and Peru. It is also spoken, to a much lesser extent, by some communities in northern Chile and northern Argentina, where it is a recognized minority language.
Academic sources confirm that Aymara is spoken in Argentina, particularly in the provinces of Jujuy and Salta. Aymara is recognized as one of the indigenous language families within the country, often grouped alongside others such as Quechua, Mapuche, and Guaraní. The University of Arizona identifies the Kolla people, who speak Aymara, as having a significant presence in these provinces.
The expansion of the Aymaran language family predates the expansion of the Quechuan language family across the southern Peruvian Andes.
Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely spoken neighbor, Quechua. That claim, however, is disputed. Although there are indeed similarities, the majority position among linguists today is that the similarities are better explained as areal features arising from prolonged cohabitation, rather than natural genealogical changes that would stem from a common protolanguage.
Aymara is an agglutinating and, to a certain extent, a polysynthetic language. It has a subject–object–verb word order. Aymara is normally written using the Latin alphabet.
Etymology The ethnonym "Aymara" may come from the name of a group in the southern part of what is now the Quechua speaking area of Apurímac.Willem Adelaar with Pieter Muysken, Languages of the Andes, CUP, Cambridge, 2004, pp 259 Regardless, the use of the word "Aymara" as a label for this people was standard practice as early as 1567, as evident from Garci Diez de San Miguel's report of his inspection of the province of Chucuito (1567, 14; cited in Lafaye 1964). In this document, he uses the term aymaraes to refer to the people. The language was then called Colla. It is believed that Colla was the name of an Aymara nation at the time of conquest, and later was the southernmost region of the Inca empire Collasuyu. However, Cerrón Palomino disputes this and asserts that Colla were Puquina speakers who ruled Tiwanaku in the first and third centuries (2008:246). This hypothesis suggests that the linguistically-diverse area ruled by the Puquina came to adopt Aymara languages in their southern region.
In any case, the use of "Aymara" for the language may have first occurred in the works of Polo de Ondegardo, a lawyer, magistrate and tax collector in Potosí and Cusco. Do Ondegardo, who later helped Viceroy Toledo to create the system under which the indigenous population would be ruled for the next 200 years, wrote a report in 1559 entitled 'On the lineage of the Yncas and how they extended their conquests' in which he discusses land and taxation issues of the Aymara under the Inca Empire.
More than a century passed before "Aymara" entered general use to mean the language spoken by the Aymara people (Briggs, 1976:14). In the meantime the Aymara language was called "the language of the Colla". The best account of the history of Aymara is that of Cerrón-Palomino, who shows that the ethnonym Aymara, which came from the glottonym, is likely derived from the Quechuaized toponym ayma-ra-y 'place of communal property'. The entire history of this term is thoroughly outlined in his book, Voces del Ande (2008:19–32) and Lingüística Aimara.Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, Lingüística Aimara, Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos "Bartolomé de las Casas", Lima, 2000, pp 34–6.
The suggestion that "Aymara" comes from the Aymara words "jaya" (ancient) and "mara" (year, time) is almost certainly a mistaken folk etymology.
Classification It is often assumed that the Aymara language descends from the language spoken in Tiwanaku because it is the native language of that area today. That is far from certain, and most specialists now think that Aymara did not expand into the Tiwanaku area until recently, as it spread southwards from an original homeland, more likely to have been in Central Peru. Aymara placenames are found all the way north into central Peru. Indeed, (Altiplano) Aymara is one of two surviving members of a wider language family, the other being Jaqaru.
The family was established by the research of Lucy Briggs (a fluent speaker) and Martha Hardman de Bautista of the Program in Linguistics at the University of Florida. Jaqaru [jaqi aru = human language] and Kawki communities are in the district of Tupe, Yauyos Valley, in the Dept. of Lima, in central Peru. Terminology for this wider language family is not well established. Hardman has proposed the name 'Jaqi' ('human') while other Peruvian linguists have proposed alternatives. Alfredo Torero uses the term 'Aru' ('speech'); Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, meanwhile, has proposed that 'Aymara' should be used for the whole family, distinguished into two branches, Southern (or Altiplano) Aymara and Central Aymara (Jaqaru and Kawki). Each of these proposals has followers in Andean linguistics. In English, some linguists use the term Aymaran languages for the family and reserve 'Aymara' for the Altiplano branch.
Dialects There is some degree of regional variation within Aymara, but all dialects are mutually intelligible.SIL's Ethnologue.com and the ISO designate a Southern Aymara dialect found in between Lake Titicaca and the Pacific Coast in southern Peru and a Central Aymara dialect found in western Bolivia and northeastern Chile. Such classifications, however, are not based upon academic research and are probably a misinterpretation of Cerrón-Palomino's classification of the language family.
Most studies of the language focused on either the Aymara spoken on the southern Peruvian shore of Lake Titicaca or the Aymara spoken around La Paz. Lucy Therina Briggs classifies both regions as being part of the Northern Aymara dialect, which encompasses the department of La Paz in Bolivia and the department of Puno in Peru. The Southern Aymara dialect is spoken in the eastern half of the Tarapacá Region in northern Chile and in most of the Bolivian department of Oruro. It is also found in northern Potosi and southwest Cochabamba but is slowly being replaced by Quechua in those regions.
Intermediate Aymara shares dialectical features with both Northern and Southern Aymara and is found in the eastern half of the Tacna and Moquegua departments in southern Peru and in the northeastern tip of Chile.Lucy Therina Briggs, Dialectal Variation in the Aymara Language of Bolivia and Peru, Dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville, 1976; Adalberto Salas and María Teresa Poblete, "El aimara de Chile (fonología, textos, léxico)", Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica, Vol XXIII: 1, pp 121–203, 2, pp 95–138; Cerrón-Palomino, 2000, pp 65–8, 373.
Geographical distribution
There are roughly two million Bolivian speakers, half a million Peruvian speakers, and perhaps a few thousand speakers in Chile.Ethnologue: 1.785 million in Bolivia in 1987; 442 thousand of the central dialect in Peru in 2000, plus an unknown number of speakers of the southern dialect in Peru; 900 in Chile in 1994 out of a much larger ethnic population. At the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, Aymara was the dominant language over a much larger area than today, including most of highland Peru south of Cusco. Over the centuries, Aymara has gradually lost speakers both to Spanish and to Quechua; many Peruvian and Bolivian communities that were once Aymara-speaking now speak Quechua.Xavier Albó, "Andean People in the Twentieth Century," in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Vol. III: South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 765–871.
Phonology
Vowels Aymara has three phonemic vowel qualities , which, in most varieties of the language, occur as either long or short (i.e. ). Long vowels are indicated in the spelling with a diaeresis in writing: ä, ï, ü. The high vowels occur as mid-high when near uvular consonants . The three vowel sounds are heard as when in unstressed positions.
Vowel deletion is frequent in Aymara. Vowel deletion typically occurs due to one of three factors: (i) phonotactic, (ii) syntactic, and (iii) morphophonemic.Matt Coler, A Grammar of Muylaqʼ Aymara: Aymara as spoken in Southern Peru . Brill: Leiden, 2014.
Phonotactic vowel deletion takes the shape of hiatus reduction when two vowels co-occur through word construction or through suffixation. In such environments, one vowel deletes. (i) if one of the two vowels is , the other vowels assimilate to it, (ii) if the vowels are and , assimilates. (iii) If the sequence is composed of two identical vowels, one will delete. Vowel elision can be syntactically conditioned. For example, in nominal compounds and noun phrases, all adjectival/nominal modifiers with three or more vowels in a modifier + nucleus NP lose their final vowel. Morphemic vowel deletion is the most common. Some suffixes never co-occur with the preceding vowel in the root, whereas others lose their own vowel in certain environments. Patterns of morphophonological vowel deletion derive from historical changes that affected individual suffixes differently, so that no clear patterns emerge.
Consonants
Aymara has phonemic stops at the labial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular points of articulation. Stops show no distinction of voice (e.g. there is no phonemic contrast between and ), but each stop occurs in three laryngeal settings: plain or voiceless unaspirated (aka tenuis), glottalized, and aspirated. Sounds such as [] occur as allophones of . Aymara also has a tapped , and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels ( and ).
Orthographic representation is the same as the IPA where not shown.
Bilabial Dental/Alveolar Palatal Velar UvularGlottal Nasal ( ) Plosive voiceless aspirated ejective Fricative () () Sonorant median lateral
Stress Stress is usually on the second-to-last syllable, but long vowels may shift it. Although the final vowel of a word is elided except at the end of a phrase, the stress remains unchanged.
Syllable structure The vast majority of roots are disyllabic and, with few exceptions, suffixes are monosyllabic. Roots conform to the template (C)V(C)CV, with CVCV being predominant. The majority of suffixes are CV, though there are some exceptions: CVCV, CCV, CCVCV and even VCV are possible but rare.
The agglutinative nature of this predominantly suffixing language, coupled with morphophonological alternations caused by vowel deletion and phonologically conditioned constraints, gives rise to interesting surface structures that operate in the domain of the morpheme, syllable, and phonological word/phrase. The phonological/morphophonological processes observed include syllabic reduction, epenthesis, deletion, and reduplication.
Orthography
Beginning with Spanish missionary efforts, there have been many attempts to create a writing system for Aymara. The colonial sources employed a variety of writing systems heavily influenced by Spanish, the most widespread one being that of Bertonio. Many of the early grammars employed unique alphabets as well as the one of Middendorf's Aymara-Sprache (1891).