CHAPTER 10
CONCLUSION

10-1 Dialectal Variation in Aymara

The foregoing chapters have examined regional and
social variation in Aymara grammatical structure. At this
point a return to the questions posed in 1-3.2 is indicated
to see what answers may now be given.

As has always been supposed, Aymara is clearly
one language. Regional and social variation exists but it
does not significantly affect intelligibility except when
certain utterances are taken out of context, primarily
because the phonemic inventory is uniform (except for the
velar nasal occurring in only two areas and in very few
morphemes) and secondarily because all dialects share a
basic set of morphophonemic rules and a basic inventory
of morphemes with the same or very similar meanings and
similar phonological shapes. Because of the nature of
Aymara morphophonemic rules, certain morphemes vary in
phonological shape within as well as across dialects.

As shown in cross-dialectal and intra-dialectal
phonological correspondences and in vowel-dropping or
-retaining morphophonemic rules, certain Aymara phonemes

are unstable. The most unstable are the sonorants (vowels

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