Andean Aymara

Fieldwork

There is a good amount differences between Aymara variants, though most are overall mutually-intelligible. The literature tends to divide Aymara into Northern, Intermediate, and Southern families - though there is also a substantial amount of variation with those groups. For more information, see Lucy Therina Briggs, Dialectal Variation in the Aymara Language of Bolivia and Peru (Dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville, 1976)

Given all the variation within Aymara, it is no surprise that the Aymara spoken in isolated places like Muylaque and Sijuaya, where this research is conducted, is unique. The exact nature of this variety is still being developed, though one can obtain a better idea of the structure of the language spoken in these communities via an examination of some of the stories collected during fieldwork in Moquegua, described here.

Those stories (listed on the right) were recorded with the Zoom H2 digital recording device in the field and were later translated and transcribed with the help of my good friend, Edwin Banegas Flores. Transcription is a slow process, though it is one of the optimal ways to understand morphophonlogy and morphosyntax. Below is an example of the Aymara as transcribed directly from the recording, followed by a morphemic analysis:

Note that the parenthetical vowels represent those deleted for whatever reason. These, too, had to be recovered

Take a look at the stories on the right which were recorded in Muylaque and Sijuaya to see more examples of transcribed Aymara.