Jaqi-aru: “Voice of the People”, an Aymara virtual community

Alicia and Rubén are also working on a virtual Aymara community, which can be found at http://www.jaqi-aru.org/.  Jaqi-aru means “voice of the people” in Aymara, and was the native language before Aymara and Quechua, similar to Latin as a predecessor to Spanish.

The goal of this project is to spread the Aymara language more widely. The project is affiliated with GlobalVoices.org.  There are over 40 articles translated into Aymara at the Global Voices website: http://aym.globalvoicesonline.org/

Two of the current scholarship students who are studying linguistics, Martin Canaviri and Mariza Quispe,  are helping with writing comments and posting photos. 

Some of those active in the project attended Evo’s inaugauration at Tiwanaku in January, and posted a write-up afterwards at the Global Voices website. They’ve also translated an article on the melting of the glaciers in Bolivia.

The site is being developed in part as a linguistic resource that Aymara teachers can draw on in the future as they instruct their students.

From their website:

"Jaqi-Aru is a community of bilingual and trilingual individuals in El Alto, who are committed to promoting the use of the native language Aymara on the Internet. Through translation projects and other digital media, we want to contribute by enriching the content in our native ancestral language in cyberspace."