Aymara language

Aymara (Aymara pronunciation: [ajˈmaɾa] ^ⓘ; also Aymar aru) is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over one million speakers. Aymara, along with Spanish and Quechua, is an official language in Bolivia and Peru. It is also spoken, to a much lesser extent, by some communities in northern Chile and northern Argentina, where it is a recognized minority language.

Academic sources confirm that Aymara is spoken in Argentina, particularly in the provinces of Jujuy and Salta. Aymara is recognized as one of the indigenous language families within the country, often grouped alongside others such as Quechua, Mapuche, and Guaraní. The University of Arizona identifies the Kolla people, who speak Aymara, as having a significant presence in these provinces.

The expansion of the Aymaran language family predates the expansion of the Quechuan language family across the southern Peruvian Andes.

Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely spoken neighbor, Quechua. That claim, however, is disputed. Although there are indeed similarities, like the nearly identical phonologies, the majority position among linguists today is that the similarities are better explained as areal features arising from prolonged cohabitation, rather than natural genealogical changes that would stem from a common protolanguage.

Aymara is an agglutinating and, to a certain extent, a polysynthetic language. It has a subject–object–verb word order. Aymara is normally written using the Latin alphabet.