Quechua is a Native American Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages. Many proposals to language family A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term comes from the Tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree or in a subsequent modification to species in a spoken primarily in the Andes The Andes are the world's longest continental mountain range. It is a continuous chain of highland along the western coast of South America. The range is over 7,000 km long, 200 km (120 mi) to 700 km (430 mi) wide (widest between 18° to 20°S latitude), and of an average height of about 4,000 m (13,000 ft) of South America South America is the southern continent of America, situated in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean; North America and the Caribbean Sea lie to the northwest, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North, Central, and South America, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples. They are often also referred to as Native Americans, Aboriginals, First Nations , Amerigine[dubious – discuss], and by Christopher Columbus' geographical and, with a total of probably some 6 to 8 million speakers (estimates vary widely). Some speakers of Quechua also call it 'runa simi' (or regional variants thereof), literally 'people speech', although 'runa' here has the more specific sense of indigenous Andean people.

Language/Dialect Groupings

There are few sharp boundaries between what might be identified as specific 'languages' within the Quechua family, which consists of large zones of dialect continua A dialect continuum, or dialect area, was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate such that speakers from opposite ends of the continuum are no longer mutually intelligible. The, although three major regions can be distinguished:

• Ecuador Quechua Kichwa is a Quechuan language including all Quechua varieties spoken in Ecuador and Colombia (Inga) by approximately 2,500,000 people. Kichwa belongs to the Northern Quechua group of Quechua II (according to Alfredo Torero) (usually known there as 'Quichua' or 'Kichwa Kichwa is a Quechuan language including all Quechua varieties spoken in Ecuador and Colombia (Inga) by approximately 2,500,000 people. Kichwa belongs to the Northern Quechua group of Quechua II (according to Alfredo Torero)'), both in the highlands and the Amazon River The Amazon River (Portuguese: Rio Amazonas; Spanish: Río Amazonas; pronounced /ˈæməzɒn/ ; /ˈæməzən/ (UK)) of South America is the largest river in the world with a total river flow greater than the next ten largest rivers combined. The Amazon, which has the largest drainage basin in the world, accounts for approximately one-fifth of the valley, with pockets also in southern and Amazonian Peru Peru (pronounced /pəˈru/ ; Spanish: Perú, Quechua: Piruw, Aymara: Piruw), officially the Republic of Peru (Spanish: República del Perú, pronounced [reˈpuβlika ðel peˈɾu] ( listen)), is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south.

• Central Quechua, spoken in the highlands from the Ancash to Huancayo regions in north-central Peru Peru (pronounced /pəˈru/ ; Spanish: Perú, Quechua: Piruw, Aymara: Piruw), officially the Republic of Peru (Spanish: República del Perú, pronounced [reˈpuβlika ðel peˈɾu] ( listen)), is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south.

• Southern Quechua, with the largest number of speakers, in all regions further south, again mostly highlands: from Huancavelica through the Ayacucho Ayacucho is the capital city of Huamanga Province, Ayacucho Region, Peru, Cuzco Cusco is a city in southeastern Peru, near the Urubamba Valley of the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cusco Region as well as the Cusco Province. In 2007, the city had a population of 358,935 which is triple the figure of 20 years ago. Located on the eastern end of the Knot of Cusco, its altitude is around 3,400 m (11,200 ft) and Puno Puno is a city in southeastern Peru, located on the shore of Lake Titicaca. It's also the capital city of the Puno Region and the Puno Province. The city was established in 1668 by viceroy Pedro Antonio Fernández de Castro as capital of the province of Paucarcolla with the name San Juan Bautista de Puno. The name was later changed to San Carlos regions of Peru Peru (pronounced /pəˈru/ ; Spanish: Perú, Quechua: Piruw, Aymara: Piruw), officially the Republic of Peru (Spanish: República del Perú, pronounced [reˈpuβlika ðel peˈɾu] ( listen)), is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south, across much of Bolivia Coordinates: 16°42′43″S 64°39′58″W / 16.712°S 64.666°W Bolivia (pronounced /bəˈlɪviə/ ), officially known as the Plurinational State of Bolivia, (Spanish: Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, IPA: [esˈtaðo pluɾinasjoˈnal de βoˈliβja]) is a landlocked country in central South America. It is bordered by Brazil to the North and in pockets in north-western Argentina The Argentine claims in Antarctica along with the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and the South Sandwich Islands (administered by the United Kingdom) shown in light green.

Speakers from different points within any one of these major regions can generally understand each other reasonably well. There are nonetheless significant local-level differences across each. (Huancayo Quechua, in particular, has several very distinctive characteristics that make this variety distinctly difficult to understand, even for other Central Quechua speakers.) Speakers from different major regions, meanwhile, particularly Central vs Southern Quechua, are not able to communicate effectively.

The lack of mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between languages in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort. It is sometimes used as one criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, though sociolinguistic factors are also is the basic criterion that defines Quechua not as a single language, as it is often mistakenly described, but as a language family. The complex and progressive nature of how speech varies across the dialect continua zones make it nearly impossible to put a precise number on how many different Quechua languages or dialects there are. As a reference point, the overall degree of diversity across the family is a little less than that for the Romance extinct: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkans (Dacian, or Germanic The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a language families, and more of the order of Slavic The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia or Arabic Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabīyah, ( Arabic pronunciation ) or عربي ʿarabī) is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. Arabic has more speakers than any other language in the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million.

History: Origins and Divergence

To compare with the historically known language families such as Romance extinct: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkans (Dacian, , Germanic The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a, Slavic The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia or Arabic Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabīyah, ( Arabic pronunciation ) or عربي ʿarabī) is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. Arabic has more speakers than any other language in the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million, let us discover the linguistic process that explains other cases. Several studies (Alfredo Torero or Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino) show that the oldest form of Quechua appeared in Cajamarquilla, Lima. Afterwards, the main focus of this language was the famous zone of Pachacamac (Lima). A third period of expansion was Chincha (Ica). At this time, the Incas found out that the Quechua was very expanded and decided that this was a tool to get the unification of the Empire. Thus the language began to spread across the Andes more enthusiasticly.

Quechua had already expanded across wide ranges of the central Andes long even before the Incas The Inca Empire, or Inka Empire, was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cusco in modern-day Peru. The Inca civilization arose from the highlands of Peru sometime in the early 13th century. From 1438 to 1533, the Incas used a variety of methods, from conquest, who were just one among many groups who already spoke forms of Quechua across much of Peru. Quechua arrived at Cuzco and was influenced by language like Aymara Aymara is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over a million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish, is an official language of Peru and Bolivia. It is also spoken to a much lesser extent in Chile and in Northwest Argentina. This fact explain that the Cuzco variety was not the more spread. In similar way, a diverse group of dialects appeared meanwhile the Inca Empire ruled and impose Quechua.

After the Spanish conquest The Spanish colonization of the Americas was the settlement and political rule over much of the western hemisphere which was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores and fought mostly by their native allies. Beginning with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, over three centuries the Spanish Empire expanded from early small settlements in in the 16th century, Quechua continued to see considerable usage, as the general language and main means of communication between the Spaniards and the indigenous population, including for the Roman Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with more than a billion members. The Church's leader is the Pope who holds supreme authority in concert with the College of Bishops of which he is the head. A communion of the Western church and 22 autonomous Eastern Catholic churches (called as a language of evangelisation. The range of Quechua thus continued to expand in some areas.

The oldest written records of the language are those of Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, who arrived in Peru in 1538 and learned the language from 1540, publishing his Grammatica o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los reynos del Perú in 1560. ^[1][2][3]

Current status

Today, Quechua has the status of an official language in both Peru and Bolivia, along with Spanish Countries where Spanish has official status. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 25% or more of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 10-20% of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 5-9.9% of the population and Aymara The Aymara or Aimara are a native ethnic group in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America; about 2 million live in Bolivia, Peru and Chile. They lived in the region for many centuries before becoming a subject people of the Inca, and later of the Spanish in the 16th century. Before the arrival of the Spaniards and the introduction of the Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient, Quechua had no written alphabet. The Incas kept track of numerical data through a system of quipu Quipus or khipus were recording devices used in the Inca Empire and its predecessor societies in the Andean region. A quipu usually consisted of colored spun and plied thread or strings from llama or alpaca hair. It could also be made of cotton cords. The cords contained numeric and other values encoded by knots in a base ten positional system (knotted strings).

Currently, the major obstacle to the diffusion of the usage and teaching of Quechua is the lack of written material in the Quechua language, namely books, newspapers, software, magazines, etc. Thus, Quechua, along with Aymara and the minor indigenous languages, remains essentially an oral language.

Quechua and Spanish are now heavily intermixed, with many hundreds of Spanish loanwords into Quechua. Conversely, Quechua phrases and words are commonly used by Spanish speakers. In southern rural Bolivia, for instance, many Quechua words such as wawa (infant), michi (cat), waska (strap, or thrashing) are as commonly used as their Spanish counterparts, even in entirely Spanish-speaking areas.

Quechua and Aymara

Quechua shares a large amount of vocabulary, and some striking structural parallels, with Aymara Aymara is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over a million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish, is an official language of Peru and Bolivia. It is also spoken to a much lesser extent in Chile and in Northwest Argentina, and these two families have sometimes been grouped together as a larger Quechumaran linguistic stock. This hypothesis is generally rejected by most specialists, however; the parallels are better explained by mutual influences and word-borrowing because of intensive and long-term contacts between their speaker populations. Many Quechua-Aymara cognates are close, often closer than intra-Quechua cognates, and there is little relationship in the affixal An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes. Affixation is, thus, the linguistic process speakers use to form new system.

Etymology of *qiĉwa

The native word */qiĉ.wa/ originally referred to the 'temperate valley' altitude ecological zone in the Andes (suitable for maize cultivation). Use of the word to describe the language (by an indirect association) is recorded relatively early in the colonial period, and seems to have been begun by the Spaniards, not Quechua-speakers themselves. The name that native speakers give to their own language is "Runa Simi".^[4]

The name quichua is first used by Domingo de Santo Tomás in his Grammatica o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los reynos del Perú, where he also mentions the mythical origin of the language, also quoted by Pedro Cieza de León and Bernabé Cobo. This myth held that the lengua general (the name by which Quechua was most widely known in the early colonial period) originated with the Quichua people, from modern Andahuaylas Province Andahuaylas Province is the second largest of the seven provinces of the Apurímac Region in Peru. The capital of the province is the city of Andahuaylas. The province is located in the north-eastern part of the region and measures 3,987.00 square kilometres. The Hispanicised spellings Quechua and Quichua have been used in Peru and Bolivia since the 17th century The 17th century was the century which lasted from 1601 to 1700 in the Gregorian calendar, especially after the III Lima Council.

Classification

This macrolanguage ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. In defining some of its language codes, some are defined as macrolanguages covering either significantly different dialects or a net of very closely related languages. There are fifty-six languages in ISO 639-2 that are considered to be macrolanguages in ISO 639-3. The use of this category is subdivided as follows, at least according to the traditional classification devised largely by Alfredo Torero and mostly adhered to by Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino. The validity of this classification is strongly disputed, however, by other Quechua linguists, since a number of regional varieties of Quechua, particularly those of Northern Peru (Cajamarca/Inkawasi), Pacaraos and the Yauyos province of the Lima Lima is the capital and largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín rivers, on a desert coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima Metropolitan Area. With a population fast approaching 9 million, Lima is the fifth largest department, do not classify well with either QI or QII and seem to be intermediate between the two branches.

Willem Adelaar largely adheres to the major QI-QII distinction, but does not accept QIIa as a valid unit. Other linguists such as Peter Landerman, Gerald Taylor and Paul Heggarty suggest more radical revisions to the whole classification. Landerman proposes a geographically based nomenclature (as for most other language families such as Germanic The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a or Slavic The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia) which identifies four regions: Northern (Ecuador and some small neighbouring areas); North Peruvian (Cajamarca/Inkawasi); Central (Ancash to Huancayo); Southern (from Huancavelica southwards).

There follows, for reference, the (much disputed) traditional Torero classification.

• Quechua I or Quechua B or Central Quechua or Waywash, spoken in Peru's central highlands and coast.
  • The most widely spoken varieties are Huaylas Ancash, Huaylla Wanca, Northern Conchucos Ancash, and Southern Conchucos Ancash.
• Quechua II or Quechua A or Peripheral Quechua or Wanp'una, divided into
  • Yunkay Quechua or Quechua II A, spoken in the northern mountains of Peru; the most widely spoken dialect is Cajamarca.
  • Northern Quechua or Quechua II B, spoken in Ecuador (Kichwa Kichwa is a Quechuan language including all Quechua varieties spoken in Ecuador and Colombia (Inga) by approximately 2,500,000 people. Kichwa belongs to the Northern Quechua group of Quechua II (according to Alfredo Torero)), northern Peru, and Colombia (Inga Kichwa)
    • The most widely spoken varieties are Chimborazo Highland Quichua and Imbabura Highland Quichua.
  • Southern Quechua or Quechua II C, spoken in Bolivia, southern Peru, Chile, and Argentina.
    • The most widely spoken varieties are South Bolivian, Cuzco, Ayacucho, and Puno.

Geographical distribution

Quechua I or Waywash is spoken in Peru's central highlands. It is the most diverse branch of Quechua,^[5] such that its dialects have often been considered different languages.

Quechua II or Wamp'una (Traveler) is divided into three branches:

• II-A: Yunkay Quechua is spoken sporadically in Peru's occidental highlands;
• II-B: Northern Quechua (also known as Runashimi or, especially in Ecuador, Kichwa Kichwa is a Quechuan language including all Quechua varieties spoken in Ecuador and Colombia (Inga) by approximately 2,500,000 people. Kichwa belongs to the Northern Quechua group of Quechua II (according to Alfredo Torero)) is mainly spoken in Colombia and Ecuador. It is also spoken in the Amazonian lowlands in Ecuador and Peru;
• II-C: Southern Quechua, spoken in Peru's southern highlands, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, is today's most important branch because it has the largest number of speakers and because of its cultural and literary legacy.

Number of speakers

The number of speakers given varies widely according to the sources. The most reliable figures are to be found in the census results of Peru (1993) and Bolivia (2001), though they are probably altogether too low due to underreporting. The 2001 Ecuador census seems to be a prominent example of underreporting, as it comes up with only 499,292 speakers of all Ecuadorian varieties of Kichwa Kichwa is a Quechuan language including all Quechua varieties spoken in Ecuador and Colombia (Inga) by approximately 2,500,000 people. Kichwa belongs to the Northern Quechua group of Quechua II (according to Alfredo Torero) (Quichua) combined, where other sources estimate between 1.5 and 2.2 million speakers.

• Argentina: 100,000
• Bolivia: 2,100,000 (2001 census)
• Brazil: unknown
• Chile: very few, spoken in pockets in the Chilean Altiplano (Ethnologue)
• Colombia: 9,000 (Ethnologue)
• Ecuador: 500,000 to 1,000,000
• Peru: 3,200,000 (1993 census)

Additionally, there may be hundreds of thousands of speakers outside the traditionally Quechua speaking territories, in immigrant communities.

Vocabulary

A number of Quechua loanwords By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept, whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort, while calque is a loanword from French have entered English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of via Spanish Countries where Spanish has official status. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 25% or more of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 10-20% of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 5-9.9% of the population, including ayahuasca Ayahuasca is any of various psychoactive infusions or decoctions prepared from the Banisteriopsis spp. vine, usually mixed with the leaves of dimethyltryptamine-containing species of shrubs from the Psychotria genus. The brew, first described academically in the early 1950s by Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, who found it employed for, coca Coca is a plant in the family Erythroxylaceae, native to north-western South America. The plant plays a significant role in traditional Andean culture. Coca is best known throughout the world because of its alkaloids, which include cocaine, a powerful stimulant, cóndor, guano, jerky, llama, pampa, puma, quinine, quinoa, vicuña and possibly gaucho. The word lagniappe comes from the Quechua word yapay ("to increase; to add") with the Spanish article la in front of it, la yapa or la ñapa in Spanish.

The influence on Latin American Spanish includes such borrowings as papa for "potato", chucaqui for "hangover" in Ecuador, and diverse borrowings for "altitude sickness", in Bolivia from Quechua suruqch'i to Bolivian sorojchi, in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru soroche.

Quechua has borrowed a large number of Spanish words, such as piru (from pero, but), bwenu (from bueno, good), and burru (from burro, donkey).

Phonology

The description below applies to Cusco dialect; there are significant differences in other varieties of Quechua.

Vowels

Quechua uses only three vowel phonemes: /a/ /i/ and /u/, as in Aymara (including Jaqaru). Monolingual speakers pronounce these as [æ] [ɪ] and [ʊ] respectively, though the Spanish vowels /a/ /i/ and /u/ may also be used. When the vowels appear adjacent to the uvular consonants /q/, /qʼ/, and /qʰ/, they are rendered more like [ɑ], [ɛ] and [ɔ] respectively.

Consonants

None of the plosives or fricatives are voiced; voicing is not phonemic in the Quechua native vocabulary of the modern Cusco variety.

About 30% of the modern Quechua vocabulary is borrowed from Spanish, and some Spanish sounds (e.g. f, b, d, g) may have become phonemic, even among monolingual Quechua speakers.

Writing system

Quechua has been written using the Roman alphabet since the Spanish conquest of Peru. However, written Quechua is not utilized by the Quechua-speaking people at large due to the lack of printed referential material in Quechua.

Until the 20th century, Quechua was written with a Spanish-based orthography. Examples: Inca, Huayna Cápac, Collasuyo, Mama Ocllo, Viracocha, quipu, tambo, condor. This orthography is the most familiar to Spanish speakers, and as a corollary, has been used for most borrowings into English.

In 1975, the Peruvian government of Juan Velasco adopted a new orthography for Quechua. This is the writing system preferred by the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua. Examples: Inka, Wayna Qhapaq, Qollasuyu, Mama Oqllo, Wiraqocha, khipu, tampu, kuntur. This orthography:

• uses w instead of hu for the /w/ sound.
• distinguishes velar k from uvular q, where both were spelled c or qu in the traditional system.
• distinguishes simple, ejective, and aspirated stops in dialects (such as that of Cuzco) which have them — thus khipu above.
• continues to use the Spanish five-vowel system.

In 1985, a variation of this system was adopted by the Peruvian government; it uses the Quechua three-vowel system. Examples: Inka, Wayna Qhapaq, Qullasuyu, Mama Uqllu, Wiraqucha, khipu, tampu, kuntur.

The different orthographies are still highly controversial in Peru. Advocates of the traditional system believe that the new orthographies look too foreign, and suggest that it makes Quechua harder to learn for people who have first been exposed to written Spanish. Those who prefer the new system maintain that it better matches the phonology of Quechua, and point to studies showing that teaching the five-vowel system to children causes reading difficulties in Spanish later on.

For more on this, see Quechuan and Aymaran spelling shift.

Writers differ in the treatment of Spanish loanwords. Sometimes these are adapted to the modern orthography, and sometimes they are left in Spanish. For instance, "I am Roberto" could be written Robertom kani or Ruwirtum kani. (The -m is not part of the name; it is an evidential suffix.)

The Peruvian linguist Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino has proposed an orthographic norm for all Southern Quechua. This norm, el Quechua estándar or Hanan Runasimi, which is accepted by many institutions in Peru, has been made by combining conservative features of two common dialects: Ayacucho Quechua and Qusqu-Qullaw Quechua (spoken in Cusco, Puno, Bolivia, and Argentina). For instance:

To listen to recordings of these and many other words as pronounced in many different Quechua-speaking regions, see the external website The Sounds of the Andean Languages. There is also a full section on the new Quechua and Aymara Spelling.

Grammar

Morphological Type

All varieties of Quechua are very regular agglutinative languages, as opposed to isolating or fusional ones. Their normal sentence order is SOV (subject-object-verb). Their large number of suffixes changes both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning. Notable grammatical features include bipersonal conjugation (verbs agree with both subject and object), evidentiality (indication of the source and veracity of knowledge), a set of topic particles, and suffixes indicating who benefits from an action and the speaker's attitude toward it, although some languages and varieties may lack of some of these characteristics.

Pronouns

In Quechua, there are seven pronouns. Quechua has two first person plural pronouns ("we", in English). One is called the inclusive, which is used when the speaker wishes to include in "we" the person to whom he or she is speaking ("we and you"). The other form is called the exclusive, which is used when the addressee is excluded. ("we without you"). Quechua also adds the suffix -kuna to the second and third person singular pronouns qam and pay to create the plural forms qam-kuna and pay-kuna.

Adjectives

Adjectives in Quechua are always placed before nouns. They lack gender and number, and are not declined to agree with substantives.

Numbers

• Cardinal numbers. ch'usaq , huk (1), iskay (2), kimsa (3), tawa (4), pichqa (5), suqta (6), qanchis (7), pusaq (8), isqun (9), chunka (10), chunka hukniyuq (11), chunka iskayniyuq (12), iskay chunka (20), pachak (100), waranqa (1,000), hunu (1,000,000), lluna (1,000,000,000,000).
• Ordinal numbers. To form ordinal numbers, the word ñiqin is put after the appropriate cardinal number (e.g., iskay ñiqin = "second"). The only exception is that, in addition to huk ñiqin ("first"), the phrase ñawpaq is also used in the somewhat more restricted sense of "the initial, primordial, the oldest".

Nouns

Noun roots accept suffixes which indicate person (defining of possession, not identity), number, and case. In general, the personal suffix precedes that of number — in the Santiago del Estero variety, however, the order is reversed.^[6] From variety to variety, suffixes may change.

Adverbs

Adverbs can be formed by adding -ta or, in some cases, -lla to an adjective: allin - allinta ("good - well"), utqay - utqaylla ("quick - quickly"). They are also formed by adding suffixes to demonstratives: chay ("that") - chaypi ("there"), kay ("this") - kayman ("hither").

There are several original adverbs. For Europeans, it is striking that the adverb qhipa means both "behind" and "future", whereas ñawpa means "ahead, in front" and "past".^[7] This means that local and temporal concepts of adverbs in Quechua (as well as in Aymara) are associated to each other reversely compared to European languages. For the speakers of Quechua, we are moving backwards into the future (we cannot see it - ie. it is unknown), facing the past (we can see it - ie. we remember it).

Verbs

The infinitive forms (unconjugated) have the suffix -y (much'a= "kiss"; much'a-y = "to kiss"). The endings for the indicative are:

To these are added various suffixes to change the meaning. For example, -chi is a causative and -ku is a reflexive (example: wañuy = "to die"; wañuchiy = to kill wañuchikuy = "to commit suicide"); -naku is used for mutual action (example: marq'ay= "to hug"; marq'anakuy= "to hug each other"), and -chka is a progressive, used for an ongoing action (e.g., mikhuy = "to eat"; mikhuchkay = "to be eating").

Grammatical particles

Particles are indeclinable, that is, they do not accept suffixes. They are relatively rare. The most common are arí ("yes") and mana ("no"), although mana can take some suffixes, such as -n/-m (manan/manam), -raq (manaraq, not yet) and -chu (manachu?, or not?), to intensify the meaning. Also used are yaw ("hey", "hi"), and certain loan words from Spanish, such as piru (from Spanish pero "but") and sinuqa (from sino "rather").

Evidentiality

Nearly every Quechua sentence is marked by an evidential clitic, indicating the source of the speaker's knowledge (and how certain s/he is about the statement). The enclitic =mi expresses personal knowledge (Tayta Wayllaqawaqa chufirmi, "Mr. Huayllacahua is a driver-- I know it for a fact"); =si expresses hearsay knowledge (Tayta Wayllaqawaqa chufirsi, "Mr. Huayllacahua is a driver, or so I've heard"); =chá expresses high probability (Tayta Wayllaqawaqa chufirchá, "Mr. Huayllacahua is a driver, most likely"). These become =m, =s, =ch after a vowel, although the latter is rarely used in its reduced form and the majority of speakers usually employ =chá, even after a vowel (Mariochá, "He's Mario, most likely").

The evidential clitics are not restricted to nouns; they can attach to any word in the sentence, typically the comment (as opposed to the topic).

Literature

Although there is not a lot of literature in Quechua, some works of fiction have been published. Johnny Payne has translated two sets of Quechua oral short stories, one into Spanish and the other into English.

In popular culture

• The fictional Huttese language in the Star Wars movies is largely based upon Quechua. According to Jim Wilce, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, George Lucas contacted a colleague of his, Allen Sonafrank, to record the dialogue. Wilce and Sonafrank discussed the matter, and felt it might be demeaning to have an alien represent Quechuans, especially in light of Erich von Daniken's popular publications that claimed Inca monuments were created by aliens because "primitives" like the Incas could never have produced them. Sonafrank declined, but a grad student, who could pronounce but did not speak Quechua, recorded Jabba's dialogue. There are reports that the dialogue was played backwards or remixed, possibly to avoid offending Quechuans.^{[citation needed]}
• The 90's TV series "The Sentinel" included numerous references to the shamanism and spirituality of the Peruvian Chopec, and included many Quechua words in several episodes.
• The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, speaks fluent northern Kichwa.
• The sport retailer Decathlon Group brands their mountain equipment range as Quechua.
• In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indy has a dialogue in Quechua with Peruvians. He explains he learned the language in Mexico from a couple of the "guys" he met while briefly riding with Pancho Villa. This adventure was featured in the pilot episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. The guys were most likely Peruvian mercenaries recruited to the División del Norte.
• In The Adventures of Tintin in particular The Seven Crystal Balls and its sequel Prisoners of the Sun. In these stories there are Quechua characters who are in league with the Inca and facilitate the abduction and incarceration of Professor Calculus at the Temple of the Sun for committing sacrilege by wearing the funerary bangle of Rascar Capac.
• In Trading Card Game Yu-Gi-Oh!, monsters in the card series Earthbound Immortals have their name originated from Quechua. In the animated series, Earthbound Immortals are described as powerful beasts sealed in Nazca Lines, which each one of them represents.

See also

• Aymara language
• Andes
• List of English words of Quechuan origin
• South Bolivian Quechua

Notes

1. ^ Torero, Alfredo (1983), "La familia lingûística quechua", América Latina en sus lenguas indígenas, Caracas: Monte Ávila, ISBN 9233019268
2. ^ Torero, Alfredo (1974), El quechua y la historia social andina, Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, Dirección Universitaria de Investigación, ISBN 9786034502109
3. ^ Ethnologue report for Quechuan (SIL)
4. ^ Mann, Charles Kellogg. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Vintage. p. 71. ISBN 1-4000-3205-9.
5. ^ Lyle Campbell, American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 189
6. ^ Alderetes, Jorge R. (1997). "Morfoligía Nominal del Quechua Santiagueño". http://usuarios.arnet.com.ar/yanasu/Cap3-1.htm.
7. ^ This is not unknown in English, where "before" means "in the past", and Shakespeare's Macbeth says "The greatest is behind", meaning in the future.

References

• Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo. Lingüística Quechua, Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos 'Bartolomé de las Casas', 2nd ed. 2003
• Cole, Peter. "Imbabura Quechua", North-Holland (Lingua Descriptive Studies 5), Amsterdam 1982.
• Cusihuamán, Antonio, Diccionario Quechua Cuzco-Collao, Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos "Bartolomé de Las Casas", 2001, ISBN 9972691365
• Cusihuamán, Antonio, Gramática Quechua Cuzco-Collao, Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos "Bartolomé de Las Casas", 2001, ISBN 9972691373
• Mannheim, Bruce, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion, University of Texas Press, 1991, ISBN 0292746636
• Rodríguez Champi, Albino. (2006). Quechua de Cusco. Ilustraciones fonéticas de lenguas amerindias, ed. Stephen A. Marlett. Lima: SIL International y Universidad Ricardo Palma. [1]

Further reading

• Quechua bibliographies online at: http://www.quechua.org.uk/Eng/Main/i_BIBL.HTM
• Adelaar, Willem F. H. Tarma Quechua: Grammar, Texts, Dictionary. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1977.
• Bills, Garland D., Bernardo Vallejo C., and Rudolph C. Troike. An Introduction to Spoken Bolivian Quechua. Special publication of the Institute of Latin American Studies, the University of Texas at Austin. Austin: Published for the Institute of Latin American Studies by the University of Texas Press, 1969. ISBN 0292700199
• Curl, John, Ancient American Poets. Tempe AZ: Bilingual Press, 2005.ISBN 1-931010-21-8 http://red-coral.net/Pach.html
• Gifford, Douglas. Time Metaphors in Aymara and Quechua. St. Andrews: University of St. Andrews, 1986.
• Harrison, Regina. Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. ISBN 0292776276
• Jake, Janice L. Grammatical Relations in Imbabura Quechua. Outstanding dissertations in linguistics. New York: Garland Pub, 1985. ISBN 082405475X
• King, Kendall A. Language Revitalization Processes and Prospects: Quichua in the Ecuadorian Andes. Bilingual education and bilingualism, 24. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters LTD, 2001. ISBN 1853594954
• King, Kendall A., and Nancy H. Hornberger. Quechua Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004.
• Lara, Jesús, Maria A. Proser, and James Scully. Quechua Peoples Poetry. Willimantic, Conn: Curbstone Press, 1976. ISBN 0915306093
• Lefebvre, Claire, and Pieter Muysken. Mixed Categories: Nominalizations in Quechua. Studies in natural language and linguistic theory, [v. 11]. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988. ISBN1556080506
• Lefebvre, Claire, and Pieter Muysken. Relative Clauses in Cuzco Quechua: Interactions between Core and Periphery. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1982.
• Muysken, Pieter. Syntactic Developments in the Verb Phrase of Ecuadorian Quechua. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1977. ISBN 9031601519
• Nuckolls, Janis B. Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua. Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN
• Parker, Gary John. Ayacucho Quechua Grammar and Dictionary. Janua linguarum. Series practica, 82. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
• Sánchez, Liliana. Quechua-Spanish Bilingualism: Interference and Convergence in Functional Categories. Language acquisition & language disorders, v. 35. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub, 2003. ISBN 1588114716
• Weber, David. A Grammar of Huallaga (Huánuco) Quechua. University of California publications in linguistics, v. 112. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. ISBN 0520097327
• Wright, Ronald, and Nilda Callañaupa. Quechua Phrasebook. Hawthorn, Vic., Australia: Lonely Planet, 1989. ISBN 0864420390

External links

• El Quechua de Santiago del Estero, extensive site covering the grammar of Argentinian Quechua (in Spanish)
• runasimi.de Multilingual Quechua website with online dictionary (xls) Quechua - German - English - Spanish.
• Quechua Language and Linguistics an extensive site.
  • The Origins and Diversity of Quechua
  • The Sounds of the Andean Languages listen online to pronunciations of Quechua words, see photos of speakers and their home regions, learn about the origins and varieties of Quechua.
• CyberQuechua, by the Quechua-speaking linguist Serafín Coronel Molina.
• Multilingual Dictionary: Spanish - Quechua (Cusco, Ayacucho, Junín, Ancash) - Aymara
• Toponimos del Quechua de Yungay, Peru
• Sacred Hymns of Pachacutec
• Quechua Network's Dictionary a very good one.
• Quechua lessons (www.andes.org) in Spanish and English
• Quechua course in Spanish, by Demetrio Tupah Yupanki (Red Científica Peruana)
• Detailed map of the varieties of Quechua according to SIL (fedepi.org)
• Google Quechua
• 5 Quechua dictionaries online

Categories: Quechuan languages | Language families

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