Aymar aru
Language Facts:
Speakers: 1.7 million
Family: Aymaran
Status: Official in Peru and Bolivia, recognized minority language in Chile
Family: Aymaran
Status: Official in Peru and Bolivia, recognized minority language in Chile
Script: Latin
- Since Aymara is a language spoken in areas where Spanish is the dominant language, speaking Spanish is a good pre-requisite to make use of all the available resources to learn Aymara.
- Aymara is very agglutinative and poly-synthetic, many suffixes/ morphemes get combined to form long words that convey the information that would take many words in other languages.
- There are no cases, gender, or number in nouns. There are different suffixes for the possessive, but not terribly complicated.
- Verbs in Aymara are more complicated. They are conjugated for tense, person, and mood. There is a distinction between recent and distant pasts.
- Basic word order is Subject-Object-Verb.
Resources for Aymara are somewhat limited, but more than some indigenous languages in the Americas. Aside from a small number of instructional Youtube videos, finding enough listening materials will be a challenge. Without knowing a native speaker, reaching a very high level will be very difficult.
Learn Aymara:
Youtube:
Aymara con Roman – 20 video playlist of basic Aymara lessons, in Spanish. Roman also wrote Aymara Basico, which is linked in the book section of this page .
Online:
The Ministry of Education of the Chilean government provides many resources on their website: (all in Spanish)
Aymara Club – great website, some vocabulary list, information on free Zoom courses offered, and some additional book recommendations/PDFs.