The family consists of Aymara, widely spoken in Bolivia, and the endangered Jaqaru and Kawki languages of Peru.

Sometime between the collapse of the Tiwanaku Empire and the rise of the Inca, some Aymaran speakers invaded the Altiplano, while others moved to the northwest, presumably ancestral to the Jaqaru and influencing Quechua I. Aymaran varieties were documented in the southern Peruvian highlands (including Lucanas, Chumbivilcas, and Condesuyos) by the 1586 Relaciones geográficas, and they appear to have persisted up until the 19th century.

The eastern and southern Bolivian highlands were still predominantly Aymara-speaking around 1600, but may have adopted Quechua as a result of development of the mining industry.

[1] Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Kechua, Kunza, Leko, Uru-Chipaya, Arawak, and Pukina language families due to contact.

Aymara and Jaqaru both contain phonemic stops at labial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular points of articulation.