Encyclopedia of the Incas

As with Quechua, the Aymara language does not have a name of its own. The
Spaniards coined the term in the second half of the sixteenth century, and like
Quechua, although more indirectly, it preserves the name of an ethnic group—
the Aymaray—from one of the provinces west of Cuzco, which was subjugated
by the Incas after their victory over the Chancas. Etymologically, the name
comes from *ayma-ra-wi, meaning a “place with many communally owned
farms.” As with Quechua, however, there are many similar place names in Peru,
and this one refers to the historical aymarays at the time of the origin of the Inca
Empire. In Spanish Colonial times, the name given to the language was haqi-aru
(language of the people, i.e., the “Indians”). That term persists, in a contracted
form, in Jacaru, the local name of one of the surviving forms of central Aymara.
According to historiographic tradition, the language may have originated in
what is now the Peruvian and Bolivian altiplano, spreading outside that area as a
result of the Inca colonization policy, especially their system of mitmacuna (see
Labor Service). That would mean, for example, that the central Aymara dialects
might be the surviving traces of the language of altiplano colonists who were
relocated in the region. Academic experts from fields other than linguistics have
traditionally held not only that Aymara originated in the altiplano, but that it was
spoken by the people who founded the Tiahuanaco civilization near Lake
Titicaca. Historical linguistics and a reexamination of some of the earliest
Colonial sources from the region, which began in the Andean area in the second
half of the twentieth century, however, have discredited that view (see Puquina).
Experts now agree that Aymara arose outside the altiplano, which explains not
only the survival of central Aymara, but also the rich tapestry of place names that
underlies Quechua and that points to the ancient omnipresence of the Aymara
language in the central Andes.
It is precisely the legacy of Aymara place names in Cuzco (in names such as
Cuzco itself or Ollantaytambo) that casts doubt on Quechua’s Cuzco origins,
indicating not only that Aymara existed in that area, but also that it could have
been the Incas’ mother tongue. That argument became more decisive in the last
decades of the twentieth century, when Andean historians found the missing
chapters (more than half) of the chronicle of Juan de Betanzos. As noted in the
entry on Quechua, the first of the newly discovered chapters of that account
(chapter 19) included a short text, later known as the “song of Pachacuti Inca
Yupanqui,” which, according to tradition, was composed on that Inca leader’s
orders, and which is written not in Quechua, as would be expected, but in
Aymara. This indicates that Aymara was both the mother tongue and the