Marcelina speaking Southern Aymara

This video was recorded by Daniel Bogre Udell in Peru and features native speaker Marcelina Choque Castro. Southern Aymara was spoken by approximately 219,000 people as of 2006 and its speakers live in the eastern half of the Iquique province in northern Chile and a large portion of the Bolivian department of Oruro. Although Southern Aymara belongs to the widely spoken Aymaran language family which extends across the Andes and is considered a dialect of Aymara, one of only a few Native American languages with over one million speakers, it is gradually being supplanted by neighboring Quechua and Spanish in some regions. Aymaran languages share a near identical phonology with Quechua and numerous areal features, but these similarities are generally thought to be a result of diffusion by proximity as opposed to evidence of a common protolanguage (though this is challenged by some linguists). Areal features are linguistic features common to a region or geography as opposed to a genealogy. Like its neighbors, Southern Aymara is agglutinative and somewhat polysynthetic. Fortunately, pedagogy in Aymaran languages is observed to be on the rise, with increasing numbers of learners both in Bolivia and abroad, and the concurrent bilingual education in Aymara and Spanish along with efforts to move education online such as ILCA, have bolstered the language's vitality.