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10-2.6 Cross-dialectal perceptions

There is a general belief among Aymara speakers
that the 'best' Aymara is spoken in La Paz. Apart from
that, Aymara speakers share the common human tendency to
prefer their own particular dialect over others. A woman
from Oruro indicated that the Aymara spoken in Oruro and
La Paz was legitimo, while that of Salinas was tosco
(coarse or crude). Speakers from Socca thought Tarata and
Sitajara Aymara sounded like baby talk, apparently because
of its velar nasals, and found Tarata Aymara ‘less developed’
than that of the province of Chucuito. They also termed
'archaic' a Sitajara usage dropping initial /lla/ and
found the occurrence of initial /ji/ or /si/ on sa.na in
other dialects ‘old-fashioned'. Similar attitudes could
probably be elicited elsewhere.

In addition to generally preferring their own dialect,
speakers tended to hear the features of that dialect in
other dialects, overlooking certain differences until they
were pointed out. For example, speakers from La Paz who
use only the longer forms of the distancer suffix -waya-
tended to hear a vowel /a/ in its occurrences in other
dialects, such as Socca, in which the allomorph /-wa-/
reduces to /w/ before consonant-requiring suffixes.
Speakers who usually used /-pini/ independent suffix tended
to hear /-puni/ as /-pini/ and vice versa. The native

speaker's virtual deafness to nonsignificant differences