Chipaya is a native South American language of the Uru–Chipaya language family. The only other language in the grouping, Uru, is considered by some to be a divergent dialect of Chipaya. Ethnologue lists the language vitality as "vigorous," with 1200 speakers out of an ethnic population of around 1800. Chipaya has been influenced considerably by Aymara, Quechua, and more recently, Spanish, with a third of its vocabulary having been replaced by those languages.
The Chipayan language is spoken in the area south of Lake Titicaca along the Desaguadero River in the mountains of Bolivia and mainly in the town of Santa Ana de Chipaya located in the Atahuallpa Province of the Bolivian department of Oruro north of Coipasa Salt Flats. Native speakers generally refer to it as Puquina or Uchun Maa Taqu ("our mother language"), but is not the same as the extinct Puquina language. Uru–Chipaya (as the language is commonly referred to, at least when referencing an aspect the dialects/languages have in common) is an agglutinating language, but has features uncommon to most language of this type, according to preliminary research by the organization DOBES.
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