Aymara phonology

## Vowels

Aymara has nine phonemic vowels /a ɛ i ɔ u æ ɒ œ ʌ/, which, in most varieties of the language, distinguish two degrees of length. Long vowels are indicated with a diaeresis in writing: *ä*, *ë*, *ï*, *ö*, *ü*. The high vowels are lowered to mid height when near uvular consonants (/i/ → [e], /u/ → [o], /ɛ/ → [ɜ], /ɔ/ → [ɞ], /ɒ/ → [ɑ]).

Vowel deletion is frequent in Aymara. Every instance of vowel deletion occurs for one of three reasons: (i) phonotactic, (ii) syntactic, and (iii) morphophonemic.

* Phonotactic vowel deletion, hiatus reduction, occurs when two vowels become adjacent as a consequence of word construction or through the process of suffixation. In such environments one of the two vowels deletes: (i) if one of the two vowels is /u/, that vowel will be the only one that surfaces, (ii) if the vowels are /i/ and /a/, the /i/ will surface. (iii) If the sequence is composed of two identical vowels, one will delete.
* Vowel elision can be syntactically conditioned. For example, in nominal compounds and noun phrases, all adjectival/nominal modifiers with three or more vowels in a modifier + nucleus NP lose their final vowel.
* Morphemic vowel deletion is the most common. Some suffixes always suppress the preceding vowel, and some lose their own nucleus under predictable conditions. The class of vowel-suppressing suffixes cannot be defined in terms of some common morphological, morpho-syntactic, or semantic feature. Suffixes from all categories in the language suppress the preceding vowel.

## Consonants

As for the consonants, Aymara has phonemic stops at the labial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular points of articulation. Stops show no distinction of voice (e.g. there is no phonemic contrast between [p] and [b]), but each stop has three forms: plain (tenuis), glottalized, and aspirated. Sounds such as [ʃ, x, ŋ] exist as allophones of /t͡ʃ, χ, n/. Aymara also has a tapped /ɾ/, and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels (/w/ and /j/).

## Stress

Stress is usually on the second-to-last syllable, but long vowels may shift it. Although the final vowel of a word is elided except at the end of a phrase, the stress remains unchanged.

## Syllable structure

The vast majority of roots are bisyllabic and, with few exceptions, suffixes are monosyllabic. Roots conform to the template (C)V(C)CV, with CVCV being predominant. The majority of suffixes are CV, though there are some exceptions: CVCV, CCV, CCVCV and even VCV are possible but rare.

The agglutinative nature of this suffixal language, coupled with morphophonological alternations caused by vowel deletion and phonologically conditioned constraints, gives rise to interesting surface structures that operate in the domain of the morpheme, syllable, and phonological word/phrase. The phonological/morphophonological processes observed include syllabic reduction, epenthesis, deletion, and reduplication.

## Orthography

Beginning with Spanish missionary efforts, there have been many attempts to create a writing system for Aymara. The colonial sources employed a variety of writing systems heavily influenced by Spanish, the most widespread one being that of Bertonio. Many of the early grammars employed unique alphabets as well as the one of Middendorf's *Aymara-Sprache* (1891).

The first official alphabet to be adopted for Aymara was the Scientific Alphabet. It was approved by the *III Congreso Indigenista Interamericano de la Paz* in 1954, though its origins can be traced as far back as 1931. Rs. No 1593 (Deza Galindo 1989, 17). It was the first official record of an alphabet, but in 1914, Sisko Chukiwanka Ayulo and Julián Palacios Ríos had recorded what may be the first of many attempts to have one alphabet for both Quechua and Aymara, the *Syentifiko Qheshwa-Aymara Alfabeto* with 37 graphemes.

Several other attempts followed, with varying degrees of success. Some orthographic attempts even expand further: the *Alfabeto Funcional Trilingüe*, made up of 40 letters (including the voiced stops necessary for Spanish) and created by the Academia de las Lenguas Aymara y Quechua in Puno in 1944 is the one used by the lexicographer Juan Francisco Deza Galindo in his *Diccionario Aymara – Castellano / Castellano – Aymara*. This alphabet has five vowels ⟨a, e, i, o, u⟩, aspiration is conveyed with an ⟨h⟩ next to the consonant, and ejectives with ⟨'⟩. The most unusual characteristic is the expression of the uvular /χ/ with ⟨jh⟩. The other uvular segment, /q/, is expressed by ⟨q⟩, but transcription rules mandate that the following vowel must be ⟨a, e, o⟩ (not ⟨i, u⟩), presumably to account for uvular lowering and to facilitate multilingual orthography.

The alphabet created by the Comisión de Alfabetización y Literatura Aymara (CALA) was officially recognized in Bolivia in 1968 (co-existing with the 1954 Scientific Alphabet). Besides being the alphabet employed by Protestant missionaries, it is also the one used for the translation of the *Book of Mormon*. Also in 1968, de Dios Yapita created his take on the Aymara alphabet at the Instituto de Lenga y Cultura Aymara (ILCA).

Nearly 15 years later, the *Servicio Nacional de Alfabetización y Educación Popular* (SENALEP) attempted to consolidate these alphabets to create a system which could be used to write both Aymara and Quechua, creating what was known as the Alfabeto Unificado. The alphabet, later sanctioned in Bolivia by Decree 20227 on 9 May 1984 and in Peru as la Resolución Ministerial Peruana 1218ED on 18 November 1985, consists of 3 vowels, 26 consonants and an umlaut to mark vowel length.
In this standard orthography, the consonants are represented as shown below.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Matt Coler, *A Grammar of Muylaq' Aymara: Aymara as spoken in Southern Peru. Brill: Leiden, 2014.*