Aymara language

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Aymara
Spoken in:	Bolivia, Peru and Chile.
Total speakers:	2,227,642 speakers of Central Aymara, no estimate available for Southern Aymara.
Language family:	Aymaran  Aymara
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	ay
ISO 639-2:	aym
ISO 639-3:	variously: aym — Aymara (generic) ayr — Central Aymara ayc — Southern Aymara
Geographic Distribution of the Aymara language.
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

Aymara is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over a million speakers.^[1][2] 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.

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 are not demonstrably related.

The Aymara language is an agglutinating and to a certain extent polysynthetic language, and has a subject-object-verb word order.

Contents 1 Etymology 2 Phonology 3 The wider language family 4 Geographical distribution 5 Unique features 6 References 7 Footnotes 8 See also 9 External links

[edit] 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. The true etymology remains unclear, though a discussion can be found in the book Lingüística Aimara by the respected Peruvian linguist Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino (2000: pp.34-6).

[edit] 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 (e.g. 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 (/w/ and /j/).

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

[edit] The wider language family

It is often assumed that the Aymara language descends from the language spoken in Tiwanaku, on the grounds that it is 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 [jaqi aru = human language] and Kawki communities are in the district of Tupe, Yauyos Valley, in the Dept. of Lima, in central Peru. Jaqaru has approximately 3,000 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 is not yet well established. Dr Hardman has proposed the name 'Jaqi', 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 (i.e. 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.

[edit] Geographical distribution

There are 1.2 million Bolivian speakers, 300,000 Peruvian speakers, 50,000 Chilean speakers and about 10,000 Argentinian speakers.

The language has several mutually intelligible varieties. One is spoken in La Paz, Bolivia; a similar variety is used by about 200,000 speakers from the border of Peru to Puno. A third distinct form is used by 90,000 speakers in the provinces of Huancané and Moho in the department of Puno in Peru.

[edit] Unique features

The language has attracted interest because it is 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 does not 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 未來 (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/前 and after/後 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, i.e., 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.

[edit] References

• Núñez, R., & Sweetser, E. With the Future Behind Them : Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time. Cognitive Science, 30(3), 1-49.

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ Bolivia: Idioma Materno de la Población de 4 años de edad y más- UBICACIÓN, ÁREA GEOGRÁFICA, SEXO Y EDAD. 2001 Bolivian Census. Instituto Nacional de Estadística, La Paz - Bolivia.
2. ^ The other native American languages with more than one million speakers are: Nahuatl, Quechua, and Guaraní.

[edit] See also

• Indigenous languages of the Americas
• Classification schemes for indigenous languages of the Americas
• Mesoamerican languages
• Language families and languages
• Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas
• Indigenous peoples of the Americas
• Category:Indigenous languages of the Americas (division into geocultural areas)
• Languages of Peru
• List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin

[edit] External links

• Aymara - Compendio de Estrutura Fonológica y Gramatical, 20 dowloadable PDF files (in Spanish)
• www.aymara.org An extensive website about the language in English, Spanish and Aymara.
• The Sounds of the Andean Languages listen online to pronunciations of Aymara words, see photos of speakers and their home regions, learn about the origins and varieties of Aymara.
• Ethnologue reports for Aymara
• (Spanish)(Aymara) Aymara.org
• Encyclopedy in Aymara
• Aymara - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary, the Rosetta Edition.
• The Dream of a Perfect Language (PDF) A lecture by Umberto Eco where he mentions Aymara.
• Andean language looks back to the future - article on Aymara's reversed concept of time, with the past ahead and the future behind
• JACH'AK'ACHI. Patpatankiri markana kont’awipa An aymara page dedicated to this city in aymara language.