Aymara (language)
| Aymara | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Bolivia , Peru , Chile | |
| speaker | 2,200,000 | |
| Linguistic classification |
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| Official status | ||
| Official language in |
 Bolivia Peru
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
ay |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
aym |
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| ISO 639-3 |
aym (macro language) Individual languages included:
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|
The Aymara (also Aymara ) is offering 2.2 million speakers, together with the Quechua and the Guaraní to today most widely spoken indigenous languages of South America . Related to him is the Jaqaru (Kawki), which is spoken by around 700 speakers in the Lima department . With the Aymara it forms the Aymara language family .
distribution
Aymara is spoken today by about 2,200,000 people who belong to the Aymara people . The majority of the speakers live on the Altiplano in the Bolivian departments of La Paz and Oruro and in the Peruvian regions of Puno , Moquegua and Tacna . There are also other speakers in other parts of Bolivia and Peru and in northern Chile . Over the past few decades, however, Aymara has increasingly been supplanted by Spanish , especially in urban areas . Today a large part of the ethnic Aymara speak Spanish as a second language or even as their mother tongue . Only in the rural areas of the Altiplano are there still a large number of monolingual speakers of the language. In addition to the bilingual Aymara-Spanish, there is also a bilingual Aymara and Quechua in some areas.
The Aymara is divided into three main dialects . Compared to other South American languages such as Quechua, whose dialects are viewed by some researchers as languages in their own right, the dialect differences within Aymara are relatively small.
Kinship
The only proven genetically related languages to the Aymara are the Kawki and the Jaqaru , both of which are now only spoken by a small number of people in the hinterland of Lima in central Peru . They are summarized with the Aymara in the Aru language family ( Aru = "language").
The question of whether there is a linguistic relationship between the Aymara and the Quechua is controversial. Both languages are only very distantly related, if at all. The similarities between the southern dialects of Quechua and Aymara, especially in the phonological field, can be explained by the mutual influence of the two languages, as can the relatively large number of loan words .
Aymara as a written language
The oldest written documents on Aymara are translations of religious texts from the Spanish colonial era . It was then that Catholic missionaries wrote the first grammars of Aymara. The so-called missionary Aymara , used by Catholic missionaries and, more recently, by North American Protestant missionaries, is clearly influenced by Spanish in both grammar and vocabulary and is therefore often perceived as unnatural by native speakers. The first complete translation of the Bible into Aymara (Qullan Arunaca) - joint work by Catholic and Protestant translators - appeared in La Paz in 1986, and a modernized edition (Qullan Arunaka) with the deutero-canonical books in 2003 also in La Paz.
Aymara grammars based on modern linguistic criteria have only existed since the second half of the 20th century.
The spelling of Aymara in the Latin writing system has long been based on the example of Spanish. The sounds of the Aymara, which differed from Spanish, were inconsistent and often not reproduced exactly. A draft for an orthography strictly based on the phonology of Aymara was first presented in 1968 by the native speaker Juan de Dios Yapita . A normative orthography that deviated only slightly from this was recognized by the Bolivian government in 1984 and the Peruvian government in 1985 as the only official spelling of the Aymara.
Aymara is now (like Quechua ) recognized as an official language in Bolivia and Peru , but this has so far not changed the factual predominance of Spanish in public life or in the state apparatus. In the last two decades, programs with intercultural bilingual education have been introduced, but so far not all Aymara-speakers have reached them.
Sociolinguistic situation today
The Aymara still has a contiguous language area in Bolivia and the neighboring areas of Peru. In rural areas it is spoken by all generations. There is a strong bilingualism with Spanish and a tendency not to pass the Aymara on to children, especially in the cities. For Bolivia, Aymara (like Quechua) was classified as potentially endangered in 2007. There is a similar situation in Peru. According to the Directorate for Intercultural Bilingual Education in Peru from 2013, the Aymara in the Puno department is spoken by all generations - at least in the village communities, so that the language is classified as vital here. In the Tacna Department, however, the Aymara is threatened, as most children no longer learn it as their first language. With the implementation of the Language Law (Ley 29735) in 2013, 1,518 schools in Puno use Aymara as a first and 147 as a second language, in Tacna 104 schools use Aymara as a second language and none as a first language. In Moquegua there are 7 schools with Aymara as the first language and two schools in which Aymara is used as a second language in addition to Quechua for students who learn Spanish as their first language.
Phonetics / Phonology
Vowels
At the phoneme level, Aymara only knows the vowels / a, i, u / <a, i, u> and their long variants / a :, i :, u: / <ä, ï, ü>. Before the uvular consonants / q, qʼ, qʰ, χ / <q, q ', qh, x>, / i / is implemented as [e] and / u / as [o]. There are no diphthongs, but two semi-vowels (approximants), namely / w / <w> and / j / <y>.
Consonants
| labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Occlusive | unmarked | p / p / | t / t / | ch / tʃ / | k / k / | q / q / |
| glottalized | p '/ pʼ / | t '/ tʼ / | ch '/ tʃʼ / | k '/ kʼ / | q '/ qʼ / | |
| aspirated | ph / pʰ / | th / tʰ / | chh / tʃʰ / | kh / kʰ / | qh / qʰ / | |
| Fricatives | s / s / | j / x / | x / χ / | |||
| Lateral app. | l / l / | ll / ʎ / | ||||
| Vibrants | r / r / | |||||
| Nasals | m / m / | n / n / | ñ / ɲ / | |||
| Half vowels | w / w / | y / j / | ||||
The Aymara has a total of 26 consonant phonemes. There are three rows facing each other in the occlusive: simple, glottalized ( ejective ) and aspirated. The occlusive are all voiceless. The Aymara does not recognize voiced plosives like / b, d, g /.
morphology
The Aymara is largely polysynthetic with many Portmanteau suffixes. Verbal suffixes often express mode, tense, person of the subject, and person of the object or other secondary argument. For example, the suffix -sma means “indicative, non-future tense , subject in first person, object in second person” (e.g. uñjsma “I see / saw you”).
Verbs with multiple valence arguments congruently compulsorily with the subject and with the most animated argument (according to the Silverstein hierarchy ), e.g. B. chursma “I gave you”, aläma “I will buy from you” etc. Special suffixes can modify the valence of verbs, e.g. B. aläma "I will buy from you" vs. ala rap ïma "I'll buy for you" vs. ala yä ma "I'll bring you to buy" u. Ä.
The Aymara has a rich system of switch reference suffixes, e.g. B. jan yati sa x sartwa "I went away without knowing it", jan yati man sartwa "I went away without you knowing it", jan yati pan sartwa "I went away without him / she knowing it would have known "etc.
literature
- Martha J. Hardman: Aymara . Lincom Europa, Munich 2001 (Lincom studies in native American linguistics; 35)
- Martha J. Hardman, Juana Vásquez, Juan de Dios Yapita et al .: Aymara: Compendio de estructura fonológica y gramatical . 2da edición. Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara, La Paz 2001 (Biblioteca lengua y cultura andina; 4; PDF version )
- Martin Eusebio Herminia: Bosquejo de estructura de la lengua aymara. Fonología - Morfología . Collecíon de Estudios Indigenistas Volume 2. Universidad de Buenos Aires 1969. ( PDF version )
- Miguel Huanca: Aymar Arux Akhamawa . Independent Publishing, Chicago 2011, ISBN 978-0-7414-6664-8 (textbook, English)
- Ernst Kausen : The language families of the world. Part 2: Africa - Indo-Pacific - Australia - America. Buske, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-87548-656-8 (Chapter 14).
- Félix Layme Pairumani: Manual intensivo de lengua Aymara . La Paz, 2014
Web links
- www.aymara.org Introduction to Aymara in Spanish and English
- Nicanor Apaza Suca, Dionisio Condori Cruz, Maria Nelly Ramos Rojas: Yatiqirinaka Aru Pirwa - Qullawa Aymara Aru. Dictionary Aymara-Spanish and Spanish-Aymara with word definitions in Aymara ( Memento from August 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive ; PDF, 8.9 MB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Emily Irene Crevels in: Emily Irene Crevels, Pieter Muysken: Lenguas de Bolivia, Ámbito andino . Plural Editores, La Paz 2009, p. 15.
- ↑ Documento Nacional de Lenguas Originarias del Perú . (PDF) Puno, Tacna, Perú, Ministerio de Educación, Dirección General de Educación Intercultural, Bilingüe y Rural, 2013, pp. 511, 513, 540, 544.