Aymara language

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Aymara is the language of the Aymara people of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over a million speakers, and it is one of the official languages of Bolivia and Peru. It is also spoken in Chile and Argentina.

Many linguists believe that Aymara is related to its more widely-spoken neighbour, Quechua. This claim, however, is disputed — although there are indeed similarities, critics say that these may simply be the result of prolonged interaction between the two languages or an areal feature, not a shared origin.

The Aymara language is an inflected language, and has a subject-object-verb word order.

Phonology

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]).

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 (i. e. there is no phonemic contrast between [p] and [b]), but each stop has three forms: plain (unaspirated), glottalized, and aspirated. Aymara also has a trilled /r/, and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels (/enwiki/w/ and /j/).

Stress is usually on the penult (the syllable before the last one), but long vowels may shift it.

External links

• Ethnologue reports for Aymara
• Template:Es iconTemplate:Ay icon Aymara.org
• Encyclopedy in Aymara
• Aymara - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary, the Rosetta Edition.