Aymaran/Pronunciation

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 Introduction to Aymaran

Aymaran bases

About Aymaran[edit | edit source]

Aymara 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.

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. It is based on a three value logic system.

References[edit | edit source]

  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.