The ethnonym "Aymara" may be ultimately derived from the name of some group occupying the southern part of what is now the Quechua speaking area of Apurímac.

[5] Regardless, the use of the word "Aymara" as a label for this people was standard practice as early as 1567, as evident from Garci Diez de San Miguel's report of his inspection of the province of Chucuito (1567, 14; cited in Lafaye 1964).

It is believed that Colla was the name of an Aymara nation at the time of conquest, and later was the southernmost region of the Inca empire Collasuyu.

This hypothesis suggests that the linguistically-diverse area ruled by the Puquina came to adopt Aymara languages in their southern region.

This man, who later assisted Viceroy Toledo in creating a system under which the indigenous population would be ruled for the next 200 years, wrote a report in 1559 entitled 'On the lineage of the Yncas and how they extended their conquests'[citation needed] in which he discusses land and taxation issues of the Aymara under the Inca empire.

That is very far from certain, however, and most specialists now incline to the idea that Aymara did not expand into the Tiwanaku area until rather recently, as it spread southwards from an original homeland that was more likely to have been in Central Peru.

Indeed, (Altiplano) Aymara is actually the one of two extant members of a wider language family, the other surviving representative being Jaqaru.

The family was established by the research of Lucy Briggs (a fluent speaker) and Martha Hardman de Bautista of the Program in Linguistics at the University of Florida.

Jaqaru [jaqi aru = human language] and Kawki communities are in the district of Tupe, Yauyos Valley, in the Dept.

In English usage, some linguists use the term Aymaran languages for the family and reserve 'Aymara' for the Altiplano branch.

The Southern Aymara dialect is spoken in the eastern half of the Tarapacá Region in northern Chile and in most of the Bolivian department of Oruro.

It is also found in northern Potosi and southwest Cochabamba but is slowly being replaced by Quechua in those regions.

[11] At the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, Aymara was the dominant language over a much larger area than today, including most of highland Peru south of Cusco.

[12] Aymara has three phonemic vowel qualities /a i u/, which, in most varieties of the language, occur as either long or short (i.e. /aː a iː i uː u/).

Vowel deletion typically occurs due to one of three factors: (i) phonotactic, (ii) syntactic, and (iii) morphophonemic.

[13] Aymara has phonemic stops at the labial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular points of articulation.

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 predominantly suffixing 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 colonial sources employed a variety of writing systems heavily influenced by Spanish, the most widespread one being that of Bertonio.

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.

Aymara is, with Quechua, one of very few [Núñez & Sweetser, 2006, p. 403] languages in which speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them.

{} Jupanakax amuyt’añampi ukat concienciampi phuqt’atapxiwa ukat maynit maynikamaw jilat kullakanakjam sarnaqapxañapa./ˈtaqi haqinaˈkaχa qʰispiˈjata juˈɾipχi ukʰamaˈɾaki hiɾaɾˈkia ukʰamaˈɾaki diˈɾitʃus ukanaˈkana kiˈkipa | hupaˈnakaχ amujtʼaˈɲampi ˈukat kunsiinsiˈampi pʰuqtʼatapˈχiwa ˈukat ˈmajnit majnˈkamaw ˈhilat kuʎakaˈnakham saɾnaqapχaˈɲapa/All human beings are born free and equal in ranking and rights.