Northern Aymaran Toponymy, Revisited: A Systematic Approach to the Linguistic Origins of Place Names

Andeanists have long suspected that the Aymaran language family once extended to the north of its northernmost surviving varieties in Central Peru, a proposal we call the Northern Aymaran Hypothesis. This article examines the source of evidence most frequently invoked in support of it: the presence of putative Aymaran toponyms north of the family’s current geographic distribution. It presents a novel methodology that does not propose specific etymologies but instead utilizes several parameters for assessing the plausibility of a particular toponym originating in an Aymaran language, applied to distinguishable toponymic components: interpretability as Aymaran, non-sharedness with other languages, reconstructability in Proto-Aymaran, number of phonemes, and semantic plausibility. These patterns are assessed across thousands of official Peruvian place names, resulting in a gradient Aymaran toponymic plausibility score for each name. We conclude that there is some faint evidence of a Northern Aymaran toponymic layer but that interpreting its relative chronology is challenging.