Aymaran is one of the two dominant language families of the central Andes

Andes

The Andes is the world's longest continental mountain range. It is a continual range of highlands along the western coast of South America. This range is about long, about to wide , and of an average height of about .Along its length, the Andes is split into several ranges, which are separated...

, along with Quechuan

Quechua languages

Quechua is a Native South American language family and dialect cluster spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably...

.

Hardman (1978) proposed the name Jaqi for the family of languages (1978), Alfredo Torero

Alfredo Torero

Alfredo Augusto Torero Fernández de Córdova was a Peruvian anthropologist and linguist....

 Aru 'to speak', and Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino

Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino

Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino is a Peruvian linguist who has crucially contributed to the investigation and development of the Quechua language. He has also made outstanding contributions to the study of the Aymara, Mochica and Chipaya languages.- Biography :He pursued his first degree at the...

 Aymaran, with two branches, Southern (or Altiplano) Aymaran and Central Aymaran (Jaqaru and Kawki).

Quechuan languages, especially that of the south, share a large amount of vocabulary with Aymara, and the languages have often been grouped together as Quechumaran

Quechumaran

Quechumaran is a language-family proposal that unites Quechua and Aymara. Quechuan languages, especially those of the south, share a large amount of vocabulary with Aymara. Kaufman finds the proposal reasonably convincing, but Wlillem Adelaar, a Quechua specialist believes the similarities to be...

. This proposal is controversial, however; the shared vocabulary may be better explained as intensive borrowing due to long-term contact.

Family division

Aymaran consists of 2 languages:

• Aymara
  Aymara language
  Aymara is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over three million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish, is an official language of Peru and Bolivia...
  
  . Southern and Central dialects divergent and sometimes considered separate languages.
• Jaqaru (Haqearu, Haqaru, Haq'aru, Aru). Kawki dialect (Cauqui, Cachuy) is divergent.

Aymara has approximately 2.2 million speakers; 1.7 million in Bolivia

Bolivia

Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...

, 350,000 in Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

, and the rest in Chile

Chile

Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

 and Argentina

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

. Jaqaru has approximately 725 speakers in central Peru, while Cauqui had 9 surviving speakers as of 2005. Cauqui is little documented, though its relationship with Jaqaru is extremely close. Initially they were considered by Dr Martha Hardman (on very limited data at the time) to be different languages, but all subsequent fieldwork and research has contradicted this and demonstrated that they are mutually intelligible but divergent dialects of a single language.