Aymara

What is Aymara related to

Altiplano Aymara is one of two surviving members of its family. The other is Jaqaru, spoken with Kawki in the district of Tupe, in the Yauyos Valley of central Peru. Lucy Briggs and Martha Hardman de Bautista of the University of Florida established the family, and its name is still unsettled: Hardman proposed Jaqi, Alfredo Torero Aru, and Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino Aymara for the whole family. Some linguists have linked Aymara to Quechua, but the majority view explains their similarities as the result of long contact.

Aymara was once assumed to descend from the language of Tiwanaku. Most specialists now think it spread south from a homeland more likely in central Peru, and Aymara place names reach that far north. At the Spanish conquest it covered most of highland Peru south of Cusco, and it has since lost speakers to both Spanish and Quechua.

Where the dialects are spoken

All dialects are mutually intelligible. Northern Aymara covers the department of La Paz in Bolivia and Puno in Peru; Southern Aymara is spoken in Oruro and in the eastern half of Chile's Tarapacá Region. Intermediate Aymara lies between them, in Tacna and Moquegua.

How one alphabet came to serve both languages

Colonial writers spelled Aymara in several Spanish-based systems, Bertonio's the most widespread. A Scientific Alphabet was approved in 1954, and a Bolivian literacy service later merged the competing systems into the Alfabeto Unificado, usable for Aymara and Quechua alike. Bolivia sanctioned it by Decree 20227 on 9 May 1984 and Peru by ministerial resolution on 18 November 1985. It has three vowels, 26 consonants and a diaeresis for long vowels, as in ä, ï and ü.

The word Aymara was used for the people by 1567, while the language was long called the language of the Colla. The folk derivation from jaya, ancient, and mara, year, is almost certainly mistaken.