Everything about Aymara Language totally explained
Aymara (
Aymar aru) is an
Aymaran language spoken by the
Aymara people of the
Andes. It is one of only a handful of
Native American languages with over a million speakers. Aymara, along with
Quechua and
Spanish, is an official language of
Peru and
Bolivia. It is also spoken to a much lesser extent in
Chile and in the Northwest
Argentina.
Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely-spoken neighbour,
Quechua. This claim, however, is disputed — although there are indeed similarities, the majority position among linguists today is that these similarities are better explained as
areal features resulting from prolonged interaction between the two languages, and that they're not demonstrably related.
The Aymara language is an
agglutinating and to a certain extent
polysynthetic language, and has a
subject-object-verb word order.
Etymology
The old suggestion that the word "Aymara" comes from the Aymara words "
jaya" (ancient) and "
mara" (year, time) is almost certainly a quite mistaken
folk etymology. Many linguists now favor the theory that the term came from an ethnic group from the Apurimac region known as the
Aymaraes, but the etymology remains unclear. A full discussion of the possible origins of the word can be found in the book
Lingüística Aimara by the respected Peruvian linguist Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino.
Phonology
Vowels
Aymara has three
phoneme vowels (/a i u/, which distinguish two degrees of length. The high vowels are lowered to mid height before uvular consonants (/i/ → [e], /u/ → [o]).
Consonants
As for the
consonants, Aymara has phonemic stops at the
labial,
alveolar,
palatal,
velar and
uvular points of articulation. Stops show no distinction of voice (for example there's no phonemic contrast between [p] and [b]), but each stop has three forms: plain (un
aspirated),
glottalized, and aspirated. Aymara also has a trilled /r/, and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels (/w/ and /j/).
Stress
Stress is usually on the penult (the syllable before the last one), but long vowels may shift it.
Geographical distribution
There are more than 2.5 million Bolivian speakers, 420,000 Peruvian speakers and 15,000 Chilean speakers. 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 Cuzco. Over the centuries Aymara has gradually lost speakers both to Spanish and to Quechua; today, many Peruvian and Bolivian communities which were once Aymara-speaking speak Quechua.
Dialects
There is some degree of regional variation within the Aymara language, although all the dialects are mutually intelligible. Most study of the language has 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 of these 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
Iquique province in northern Chile and in most of the Bolivian department of
Oruro. It is also found in northern
Potosí and southwest
Cochabamba, but it's 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 southwest Peru and in the northeastern tip of Chile.
.
The wider language family
It is often assumed that the Aymara language descends from the language spoken in
Tiwanaku, on the grounds that it's the native language of that area today. This is very far from certain, however, and most specialists now incline to the idea that Aymara only expanded into the Tiwanaku area rather late, 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, and indeed (Altiplano) Aymara is actually but one of the two extant languages of a wider language family, the other surviving representative being
Jaqaru/Kawki.
This family was established by the research of Martha James Hardman de Bautista of the Program in Linguistics at the University of Florida. Jaqaru [jaqiaru = human language] and Kawki communities are in the district of Tupe, Yauyos Valley, in the Dept. of Lima, in central Peru. Jaqaru has approximately 2,000 native speakers, nearly all Spanish bilinguals. Kawki is spoken in a neighboring community by a very small number of mostly elderly individuals and is a dying language. It was originally proposed by Dr Hardman that Jaqaru and Kawki should be classified as languages quite distinct from each other, but other more recent research classifies them as two very closely related varieties of the same mutually intelligible language.
Terminology for this wider language family isn't yet well established. Dr Hardman has proposed the name 'Jaqi' ('human'), while other widely respected Peruvian linguists have proposed alternative names for the same language family. Alfredo Torero uses the term 'Aru' ('speech'); Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, meanwhile, has proposed that the term 'Aymara' should be used for the whole family, distinguished into two branches, Southern (or Altiplano) Aymara and Central Aymara (for example Jaqaru and Kawki). Each of these three proposals has its followers in Andean linguistics. In English usage, some linguists use the term
Aymaran for the family, reserving 'Aymara' for the Altiplano branch.
Unique features
The language has attracted interest because it's based on a
three value logic system, and thus supposedly has better expressiveness than many other languages based on
binary logic.
It is cited by the author
Umberto Eco in
The Search for the Perfect Language as a language of immense flexibility, capable of accommodating many
neologisms.
Ludovico Bertonio published
Arte de la lengua aymara in
1603. He remarked that the language was particularly useful for expressing abstract concepts. In
1860 Emeterio Villamil de Rada suggested it was "the language of Adam" (
la lengua de Adán).
Guzmán de Rojas has suggested that it be used as an intermediary language for
computerised translation.
Linguistic and gestural analysis by
Núñez and
Sweetser also assert that the Aymara have an apparently unique, or at least very rare, understanding of time, and is, besides
Quechua, one of very few languages where speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Their argument is situated mainly within the framework of
conceptual metaphor, which recognizes in general two subtypes of the metaphor THE PASSAGE OF TIME IS MOTION: one is TIME PASSING IS MOTION OVER A LANDSCAPE (or "moving-ego"), and the other is TIME PASSING IS A MOVING OBJECT ("moving-events"). The latter metaphor doesn't explicitly involve the individual/speaker; events are in a queue, with prior events towards the front of the line. The individual may be facing the queue, or it may be moving from left to right in front of him/her.
The claims regarding Aymara involve the moving-ego metaphor. Most languages conceptualize the ego as moving forward into the future, with ego's back to the past. The
English sentences
prepare for what lies before us and
we are facing a prosperous future, and possibly the
Chinese word (lit. not yet come, meaning
future) exemplify this metaphor. In contrast, Aymara seems to encode the past as in front of individuals, and the future in back; this is
typologically a rare phenomenon.
Many languages, including English and Chinese, have words like
before/ and
after/ that are (currently or archaically)
polysemous between 'front/earlier' or 'back/later'. This seemingly refutes the claims regarding Aymara uniqueness. However, these words relate events to other events, for example, are part of the moving-events metaphor. In fact, when
before means
in front of ego, it can only mean
future. For instance,
our future is laid out before us while
our past is behind us. Parallel Aymara examples describe future days as
qhipa uru, literally 'back days', and these are sometimes accompanied by gestures to behind the speaker. The same applies to
Quechua speakers, whose expression
qhipa p'unchaw corresponds directly to Aymara
qhipa uru.
Footnotes
Further Information
Get more info on 'Aymara Language'.
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