To begin, although the phonology of Aymara is relatively simple, the phonetic inventory is interesting, though should not be thought of as atypical within an Andean context. As shown in the table below, there are 25 consonants, 2 semi-consonants. Of principal interest is the three-way division between plain, aspirated and glottal: C, Ch, C’. There are no voiced stops in any variety of Aymara.
Aymara is a suffix-only highly agglutinative language. Many sentences in Aymara contain only a single verbal root affixed with a combination of inflectional and derivational morphology alongside some independent suffixes and an obligatory sentence suffix. The words below have four, six and seven morphemes attached to the root, respectively – observe that the last word is a verbalized noun root:
Chaqarawjwiritaynax.
{chaqa-ra-wjw-iri.tayna-x(a)}
lose-MLT-SFT-3HB.FR-TO
‘They had been lost.’ (‘Se habían perdido.’) [MBF1.013]
Awisaskakipunimamaw.
{awisa-s(i)-ka-ki-puni-mama-w(a)}
tell-PR-AN-DL-EM-1>2S-AF
‘I really must tell you the truth.’ (‘Voy a tener que a decirte la verdad.’) [NM1.015]
Utachnuqasijwaphiritaynaw.
{uta-ch(a)-nuqa-si-jwa-ph(a)-iri-tayna-w(a)}
house-FA-PLA-RF-SFT-PL-3HB-FR-AF
‘They used to know how to make houses.’ (‘Sabían hacerse casas.’) [JMF1.01]
As the nominal root in the previous utterance was verbalized, a verb may be nominalized and then reverbalized. The root below is nominalized with the infinitive and then verbalized with the copulative verbalizer as evidenced by the fact that the conjectural –chi did not suppress the previous vowel as it otherwise does when not preceded by the CV morpheme:
Sarañapanakachijall.
{sara-ña-pa-naka-v-chi-jall(a)}
go-IF-3P-PL-CV-3DU-DIS
‘They had to go one supposes.’ (‘Seguro tenían que ir.’) [MBF0.003]
Just as with the nominal morphology, the verbal morphemes are split into derivational and inflectional categories. Derivational verbal suffixes are subdivided into deverbative verbal suffixes — those which do not change the category of the root, and deverbal nominal suffixes, i.e. nominalizers. The former of the two serves as the aegis for three divisions: directional/spatial morphemes, grammatical morphemes (the causative, reflexive, and reciprocal), and aspect morphology, which is, in turn, further subdivided into perfective and imperfective categories. As expected, the inflectional suffixes are grouped into person, number, tense, and mood.