After years of proposals and meetings, Bolivian Decreto Supremo 20227-DS (May 9, 1984) and Peruvian Resolución Ministerial 1218-RM (November 18, 1985) eventually approved by law the Aymara Official Alphabet, that is also called the Unified Alphabet. It can be considered a synthesis of both Yapita and Maryknoll orthographies, that were widely used and accepted by scholars and a few Aymara users.

Unified alphabet consists of twenty-six (26) consonants and three (3) vowels. As every single phoneme is represented by one single letter, it is a phonemic system. Of course it is not perfect, since unrepresented phonemes exist in different dialects. However, it is widely known there is no other language in the world where a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and letters exist, so this kind of orthographical convention is necessary. In the picture (left), twenty-six (26) consonants of the Aymara alphabet are shown. They are classified into five (5) groups, according to their articulation point. These articulation points where Aymara consonants are produced are: bilabial, dento-alveolar, alveo-palatal, velar and postvelar.

In English, letters k (as in king) and q (as in queue) are two different representations of the same /k/ phoneme. In Aymara, they represent two different phonemes. Notice that Aymara phonemes /k/ and /q/ are produced in two different points of articulation: velar and postvelar (see the figure left). This can be verified through the mp3 sound files that can be found in the Table I below (download files kanka and qaqa to see the difference between /k/ and /q/). Besides, in Table I the Aymara alphabet is presented according to the different articulation points (upper figure) and articulation modes (aspirated, ejective, fricative, etc.)

Table I: Sonorised Official Alphabet

CONSONANTS
.	Bilabial	Dento- Alveolar	Alveo- Palatal	Velar	Postvelar
Simple occlusives	p patxa	t titi	.	k kanka	q qaqa
Aspirated occlusives	ph phaxsi	th thaxa	.	kh khusa	qh qhach'u
Glottalized occlusives	p' p'iqi	t' t'ula	.	k' k'utuña	q' q'urawa
Simple  affricates	.	.	ch chacha	.	.
Aspirated affricates	.	.	chh chhala	.	.
Glottalized affricates	.	.	ch' ch'illiwa	.	.
Fricatives	.	s saxra	.	j jach'a	x saxra
Laterals	.	l layqa	ll llij-lliju	.	.
Nasals	m mamani	n nasa	ñ ñiq'i	.	.
Flaps	.	r saxra	.	.	.
Semiconsonants	w wali	.	y yauri	.	.
VOWELS
Simple			Vowel lengthening
Front	Central	Back	Front	Central	Back
i	a	u	ï	ä	ü

Basic ortography

1. When i and u are contiguous to any postvelar phoneme (q, q', qh and x), they become open, so alophonic /e/ and /o/ forms occur. Alophones are the spoken variant forms of one single phoneme. They are not independent phonemes. Examples: listen how ñiq'i and q'urawa pronunciation gets opened to ñeq'e and q'orawa.
2. There are no diphthongs in Aymara. Instead, y or w approximants must be used. Example: wara-wara instead of huara-huara.
3. Every Aymara word has a tonic (stressed) syllable. Almost all Aymara words are stressed on their next-to-last syllables. Examples: listen all words in Table I. More examples: na·ya (I), ji·wa·sa (you and me), lu·ra·ña·ni (let's do), etc. Yet, there are exceptions (see next item).
4. All orthographic proposals for Aymara language, Unified official orthography as well, discourage the use of graphical stress marks. The only Aymara diacritical sign is the diaeresis mark (¨) placed on long vowels/syllables. In this case, stress/lengthening is assigned to this syllables. Examples: listen janiw ukham sañäkiti(it doesn't have to be said so). Other examples: sa·rä(I'm going), ja·nï·pu·niw (never ever, absolutely not), etc.
5. There is a great controversy about using b, c, d, e, f, g, h, o, v, z letters in borrowings from Spanish. For example, bomba atómica (Spanish for atomic bomb) is adapted according to Aymara phonetic constraints as wumpa atumika, buenos dias (good morning) as winus tiyas, etc. How should they be written? According to Aymarization forms? Or according to Spanish orthography?

Other alphabets

The Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote that, when Spaniards arrived, all peoples inhabiting the lake Titicaca basin spoke the Aymara language. It had no alphabet. In 1603, in the city of Juli, head of the Chucuito province in Peru, a printing facility was established where the works of Ludovico Bertonio were published. These books still are the main source of information for any linguistic research on Aymara language. Bertonio was the first to propose an Aymara alphabet which was based in the Spanish alphabet of the period. Yet, Bertonio's alphabet is ambiguous for fricative and occlusive velar phonemes, as well as for occlusive uvular phonemes. That is one of the reasons why up to 30 different alphabets were proposed for Aymara language.

The eight most important alphabets ever proposed for Aymara are presented in Table II. Bertonio (1612), Middendorf (1891) and CALA (Aymara Literature and Alfabetization Comission, 1968) alphabets had more than 26 phonemes, whereas Ebbing (1965), Maryknoll (1975), Yapita (1968), IGR (Iván Guzmán de Rojas, 1984) and Official (also called Unified, 1984) alphabets show 26 phonemes. Pay attention to the three rightmost columns in Table II and verify that Official (Unified) alphabet is a combination of Yapita and Maryknoll alphabets.