Aymara Language - Orthography

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 Hispanized writing systems, the most widespread being that of Bertonio. Many of the early grammars employed unique alphabets as well, e.g. that of Middendorf’s Aymara-Sprache (1891).

The first official alphabet to be adopted for Aymara was the scientific alphabet. This system 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). This is not to say that this was the first effort at a general alphabet, only that it was the first official record of such. In 1914 Sisko Chukiwanka Ayulo and Julián Palacios Ríos recorded what may be the first of many attempts to have one alphabet for both Quechua and Aymara. Theirs was called Syentifiko Qheshwa-Aymara Alfabeto and was composed of 37 graphemes. Several other attempts followed at various degrees of success to do the same. 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 unique characteristic is the expression of the uvular /x/ with {jh}. The other uvular segment, the /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 with the intent to facilitate multilingual orthography.

The alphabet created by the Comisión de Alfabetización y Literatura Aymara (CALA) which was officially recognized in Bolivia in 1968 (coexisting with the 1954 Scientific Alphabet) and aside from being the alphabet employed by Protestant missionaries, it is also the one used for the translation of the Book of Mormon. It was also in 1968 that de Dios Yapita created his take on the Aymara alphabet at the Instituto de Lenga y Cultura Aymara (ILCA).

Nearly fifteen 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. This alphabet, later sanctioned in Bolivia by Decree 20227 on 9 May 1984 and in Peru as la Resolución Ministeral Peruana 1218ED on 18 November 1985 consists of 3 vowels and 26 consonants and an umlaut to mark vowel length.