Aymara

Aymara, with the stress on the final syllable, is the second of the major Indian languages of western South America. There are about 2 million speakers, of whom about three-fourths live in Bolivia, the rest in Peru. Aymara and Quechua constitute a single subfamily of the Andean Equatorial family of languages. The Aymara language has traditonal form of picture writing, used until quite recently to produce versions of Christian religiou texts. In Modern Bolivia, where the largest community of speakers is to be found, Aymara is now written in the Latin Alphabet.Many Bolivians are trilingual in Aymara, Quechua and Spanish. Thus, besides its Quechua elements, Aymara has now many Spanish loanwords, though they are altered to fit the sound pattern.