How many languages do they speak in Bolivia?

Bolivia is one of the culturally most diverse countries in the continent. It has an area fourteen times larger than Czechia with the same number of inhabitants. Another million Bolivians live abroad, mainly in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Chile and the USA.

According to the Bolivian constitution, apart from Spanish, all indigenous (pre-Columbian) languages ​​in Bolivia are official languages ​​of the country. Specifically, 36 are listed.

According to the census from 2010 a quarter of Bolivians speak Quechua, less than a fifth speak Aymara, one percent Guarani, and another half percent speak other indigenous languages. About a million Bolivians speak only a native language ​​(they do not use Spanish), half of Bolivia's population speaks only Spanish without knowledge of any native language.

GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES IN BOLIVIA

A peculiar isolated ethnicity in Bolivia are the Mennonites, who have settled in the Amazon region of Bolivia, near the city of Santa Cruz, since the sixteenth century. They mostly came from the Netherlands and what was then Prussia. Today, 70,000 of them live here and, in addition to Spanish with a recognizable accent, they speak an old German dialect called Plautdietsch, which they use in everyday life.

It's easy to tell which part of Bolivia the speaker is from by her or his Spanish accent. The Andean accent (colla*) is characterized by swallowing of vowels, the lisppy "s" (similar to how they pronounce it in Spain) and the pronunciation of the letter "r" like a "z" in zebra. Corre pués. = Kóze, psh. (Run, then.)

*The word "colla" should be used with caution, as it is a racially and culturally sensitive term.

The Amazonian accent (camba) is characterized by a higher rate of use of the pronoun "vós" and the pronunciation of the final "s" as an aspirated "h", as when we breathe on a mirror. Vós me entendés. = Bóh me entendéh. (You understand me.)

The most common loanwords into Spanish from native American languages ​​are Quechuanisms. Among the most used are the following: cancha (playground), carpa (tent), pucho (cigarette butt), choclo (a type of corn), papa (potato), poto (butt), wawa (child), yapa (a street food seller might offer you a "yapa" or "yapita" and serve you a little extra as a courtesy of the house), palta (avocado), coronta (corn cob core), chango (little boy), guano (bird excrement fertilizer), chaco (cultivated land).