Subdivisions of Bolivia in Spanish, Aymara and Quechua: 9 departments

How Aymara and Quechua write the names of Bolivia

Spanish spells the Andean names the way sixteenth-century scribes heard them; Aymara and Quechua write them back in their own alphabets, which use k, q, w and an apostrophe for the ejective consonants. Cochabamba is Quchapampa in both languages, Potosí is Putusi in Aymara and P’utuqsi in Quechua, and Copacabana on Lake Titicaca is Qupakawana or Qupaqhawana. Where the two languages part, the difference is often a single letter: Pando’s capital Cobija is Kuwixa in Aymara and Kuwiha in Quechua.

The words for the units come from both worlds. A department is jach’a suyu in Aymara and simply suyu in Quechua; the Aymara province is jisk’a suyu, while Quechua borrowed pruwinsya from Spanish provincia. The province tables leave those words out and give the bare name, with the capital in brackets where its name differs. Compass words are translated too: Nor Yungas becomes Chinchay Yunka in Quechua, Sud Lípez becomes Uralan Lipis, and Aymara writes Araxa Chichas and Araxa Lipis for the two northern provinces of Potosí.

Many provinces carry the name of a person, and those mostly stay as they are: Germán Busch, Ñuflo de Chávez, Burnet O’Connor. Others become new words. Cordillera in Santa Cruz is Urquwallqa in Quechua, Los Andes in La Paz is Antikuna, and Entre Ríos, capital of Burnet O’Connor, is Mayupura.

What changed: the Plurinational State and one capital

The first level has been stable for decades. Bolivia has nine departments, and ISO 3166-2:BO has listed them with one-letter codes since 1998; the letters come from the vehicle registration plates, so Chuquisaca is BO-H and Pando BO-N. The only entries in the change history concern the country itself: ISO 3166-1 adopted the short name Bolivia (Plurinational State of) on 8 May 2009, after the constitution of that year renamed the republic the Plurinational State, and ISO 3166-2 followed in February 2010. ISO writes the Beni department as El Beni.

The 112 provinces of the list are the 112 provinces Bolivia still has. One capital needs a correction: Luis Calvo in Chuquisaca is governed from Villa Vaca Guzmán, the name a law of 14 November 1947 gave to the town many still call Muyupampa; the table uses that name and gives no Quechua form for it. Below the provinces Bolivia counts 337 municipalities, which hold the elected local governments that the provinces themselves lack.