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.
[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 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&_160;— 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.
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.[3]
