Aymara: 3 special characteristics of the language and why it is not the same in Peru, Bolivia and Chile

However, despite the high number of speakers, their situation is fragile, describes the United Nations Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO).

There are efforts for the language to strengthen.

Since May of this year, the Google translator includes Aymara in his language list and several applications and websites offer dictionaries in the Andean language, to name some initiatives.

But there is pessimism about the future of the language.

“I am pessimistic because I live that reality. If today the child does not speak Aymara, tomorrow it will be a young man who will not speak it. Only those who speak will get older with our language,” Roger Gonzalo, a professor of Andean languages at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), told BBC world.

“There are no serious educational policies or social policies. There are very good laws, but with them practical things are not resolved,” he reflects.

The history of the Aymara dates back to more than 10,000 years.

Its origin is closely linked to the goddess Pachamama or Mother Earth.

The great nation of Tiwanaku (or Tiahuanaco) governed by Aymara ancestors existed between 1580 AC at 1172 AD, that is, it lasted about 2,800 years.

Its splendor and influence was remarkable in the Altiplano of the South Andean.

It covered part of the Sierra del Peru, northern Chile, northern Argentina extending to the valleys and jungles of Bolivia.

Between 1470 and 1535 the Nation of Tahuantinsuyo ruled by the Incas who refined and perfected the principles of religiosity and organization of the people is imposed, they enhanced culture and economic activity.

The Nation of Tahuantinsuyo ends with the arrival of the Spaniards who try to impose their culture and an amalgam is generated with the Aymara tradition that lasts until today.

In BBC Mundo we ask ourselves, what makes Aymara a special language? And why is a different Aymara in Peru, Bolivia and Chile?

Here we tell you 3 of its main characteristics:

Aymara is not a single language but a family of languages.

This is comparable to the term “romance languages” of which Spanish is part, as are French and Portuguese, for example.

“Aymara is a family of languages, but many Aymara languages have become extinguished, especially in the center and south of Peru,” says Professor Gonzalo.

Today there are only two important languages within Aymara: the Jaqaru and the Southern Aymara or simply Aymara.

The first is a language that only 700 people speak in the mountains of the Sierra de Lima.

There is also a variety of jaqaru called cauqui and that only has dozens of speakers, mostly older people. It is a language that is in the process of extinction.

“The Lima do not know that they have their own indigenous language,” says the professor of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

The second group is the most widespread Aymara that is discussed in southern Peru, Bolivia, Chile, South Ecuador and northwest of Argentina.

Perhaps the most striking particularity of Aymara is the ability to form words that are very long, which can exceed the 30 letters in some cases.

Like this example that the American linguist Martha Hardman quotes:

We can only talk about talking to it.

This Aymara word can be translated approximately: “I have personal knowledge that it is necessary that all of us, including you, make the effort to communicate.”

This extensive words formation is because Aymara is an binder language.

Organizing means to gather, pile up, add.

“The language works with many prefixes, suffixes and infixes. They are particles that are attached to a root and each one indicates gender, number, verbal, noun time, etc.”, explains Celia González Estay, a doctor in echolinguistics at the Arturo Prat University, in Iquique, Chile.

“Therefore, a word that is very long, is because there are many things there: who is, who does it, in what time is doing it,” adds the academic to BBC Mundo.

This characteristic makes it “completely different from Spanish, which is a language that is separated, disaggregates,” he details.

Other binding languages are Quechua, Japanese and Turk, to name a few.

Another characteristics of Aymara is the use of vowels: a word never shows two vowels together.

And with the adhesion of suffixes or prefixes, the vowel elimination phenomenon also occurs.

“If about five suffixes lose their vowels in a word, then there are no vowels. You have to pronounce about seven or eight consonants together,” Gonzalo details.

Another syntactic detail of Aymara is that the nucleus or subject is always at the end, similar to English and opposite to Spanish.

If there is something that is typical of Andean languages and many other aborigines is that culture is transmitted orally.

So, the grammar of the Aymara language was never written.

Academic works to describe the grammatical characteristics of Aymara just began in the 1960s, experts point out.

“The fact that today you can be writing is an advance for the western world, but it is not part of the linguistic exercise of the community. They know many things they say but are not written,” says Celia González.

“Researchers are trying to collect the knowledge and knowledge of the original peoples because they are not written. And it is not easy, because it is information that is generated within the family or within the community and is not open to public,” he describes.

What is the way of knowing if one language is different from another in the same linguistic family?

When the two speakers are not understood, the specialists point out.

“Compression between a Jaqaru speaker and the Southern Aymara is almost null. It is the same as those who speak to a Spanish speaker in French,” compares Gonzalo.

But the Southern Aymara is not the same either.

“When a language arrives at a territory, it begins to mix with local languages. And then start having its own differentiations in each place. It is the same thing that happens with Aymara,” says Celia González.

Then dialect variants arise, although in this case there is no problem of absolute incommunication.

“In the Tarapacá region (Chilean North), it is spoken in a way, with certain sounds and other words that are used to say the same with respect to the Aymara of Villa Parinacota that is about 300 km further north” on the border with Bolivia, González exemplifies.

“The Aymara that is spoken in Oruro is different from that spoken in La Paz, Bolivia,” adds, although only about 220 kilometers separate both cities.

While in Peru three large varieties of Aymara are recorded: in Puno, Tacna and in Moquegua.

For centuries it was believed that Aymara and Quechua languages shared an origin. But it is not so.

“They are not sister languages but they are very friendly languages,” describes Roger Gonzalo.

In historical terms, it is known that the Inca Empire carried out an expansion exercise in the early fifteenth century carrying its Quechua language to territories that are currently Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

There is a mixture between Quechua and Aymara. Both languages begin to live together and do so for centuries.

While both languages are binding in their grammatical characteristics, and share approximately 25% of words, they are two different languages.

“The expansion is an explanation of why there are Aymara words in Quechua and there are Quechua words in Aymara,” says Celia González.

The different personal pronouns in Aymara and Quechua are an indication of their differences.

“In Quechua the words can end in a vowel and consonant. And that makes the application of certain rules to add another suffix. On the other hand in Aymara, all the words end in a vowel,” explains, on the other hand, Gonzalo.

Learning Aymara seems to be a challenge.

“It is not an easy language to learn, like Quechua or any binder language,” says Celia González.

In addition to the grammatical complexities of the language, the discrimination suffered by some of the Aymara speakers suffers.

“When asked if they are speakers, many deny it, because there is a feeling of inferiority,” describes Roger Gonzalo, whose mother tongue is Aymara.

“History has shown us that by speaking Aymara many people have suffered discrimination from the State in the political, economic, social and cultural. Then there is ashamed to speak the Aymara language,” he acknowledges.

To this is added the little availability of teachers who understand culture and teach the language.

“Teacher training is essential because there is the Aymara community here. If a child is behaving in a particular way it is largely because of their culture,” says Celia González.

The teacher, who lives in Iquique, also highlights that these children Aymara are related to other cultures that are not Andean or migrants who arrive from Venezuela or Colombia, for example.

“We must introduce this theme at the university so that we are training professionals who also have this look or sensitivity” on the Aymara culture, he says.

Or as the Aymara.org site specialized in that language stands out:

Nax is dead. He will have a thousand thousands of years

“I will die but tomorrow will return millions.”

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