Aymara is an indigenous language spoken in South America. The first comprehensive grammar was written by a Jesuit named Ludovico Bertonio, Arte de la lengua aymara in 1603, and since then there have been a number of works dealing with the language from various perspectives.
There are a number of ways to write the language – although there are a few alphabets developed recently, I use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) for consistency. The first thing one must learn to pronounce Aymara correctly, is that the stops (/p, t, k/) have three forms of pronunciation: simple, aspirated (as if followed by /h/), and glottalized (produced in the glottis by maintaining the air in the vocal cavity, before expulsing in a quick burst). Orthographically, the plain stops are written as {p, t, k, q}, the aspirated sounds are written with a suprascript aspiration symbol, {ph, th, kh, qkh } – though in non-IPA Aymara alphabets they are often written as {p”, t”, k”, q” }, and the glottalized sounds have an apostrophe following the letter {p’, t’, k’, q’}. The other interesting aspect of Aymara which speakers of some European languages may not be aware of is that of vocalic lengthening, in other words, the vowel of an Aymara word can be made longer. There are never two different vowels appearing together one after another.
The sounds of Aymara appear below. Note that there are 25 consonants, 2 semi-consonants (y, w), and 3 vowels (i, a, u).
Now, bearing in mind what you’ve just learnt, it is important to be aware of some potentially confusing minimal pairs in the language:
chara ‘leg’ vs. ch’ara ‘black’
jupa ‘s/he’ vs. jupha ‘quinoa’
The next most important quality of this language is that it is suffixal, there are many suffixes (and no affixes) which attach to roots to provide word order for the language, so tatalanakaxa ‘our fathers’ is actually a root tata- ‘father’ followed by la-naka-xa. This shows that Aymara is agglutinative, that is, words are formed by added a suffix or suffixes to a root; one word in Aymara may be a sentence in English or Spanish.
Here are some simple phrases you can learn in Aymara:
Jumasti? ‘And you?’
Walikiraki. ‘Fine, too’
Jikisinkama! ‘Until we meet again.’
Aka ‘this’
Uka ‘that’
Khaya ‘that yonder’
1. maya 2. paya 3. kimsa 4. pusi 5. phisqa 6. suxta 7. paqalqu 8. kimsaqalqu 9. llatunka 10. tunka 11. tunka mayani 12. tunka payani 20. pa tunka 21. pa tunka mayani 30. kimsa tunka 100. pataka 124. pataka pa tunka pusini 1000. waranqa / waranka 3087. kimsa waranqa kimsaqalqu tunka paqalquni 10000 tunka waranqa
Expressing possession (ownership) in Aymara is not so hard, just follow this template: [possessor]-na + [possessed]-PO. xa/ma/pa/sa. Given that the grammatical persons are naya ‘I’, juma ‘you’, jupa ‘s/he’ and jiwasa ‘we’, we can make the following phrases from the possession template (though the marker on the first person possessed object in Muylaque and Sijuaya Aymara is –xa, as below, in other variants it may be –ña or –nha):
Nan anuxa ‘my dog’
Juman anuma ‘your dog’
Jupan anupa ‘his/her dog’
Jiwasan anusa ‘our dog’
Note that for ‘my dog’ we don’t write *nayana anuxa – the last /a/ of ‘my’ is deleted. This sort of vowel deletion is one of the most interesting aspects of Aymara.
Now, to make a simple declarative phrase, it is necessary to use the sentence suffix: -wa. This is an affirmative suffix and it works as below: 
Nan anuxawa ‘It is my dog.’
Juman anumawa ‘It is your dog.’
Jupan anupawa ‘It is his/her dog.’
Jiwasan anusawa ‘It is our dog.’
Similarly, to ask a question, one must use the interrogative suffix -ti:
Nan anuxati? ‘Is it my dog?’
Juman anumati? ‘Is it your dog?’
Jupan anupati? ‘Is it his/her dog?’
Jiwasan anusati? ‘Is it our dog?’
