Quechua

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Quechua
Qhichwa Simi / Runa Shimi / Runa Simi
Pronunciation ['qʰeʃ.wa 'si.mi] ['χetʃ.wa 'ʃi.mi] [kitʃ.wa 'ʃi.mi] [ʔitʃ.wa 'ʃi.mi] ['ɾu.nɑ 'si.mi]
Spoken in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina.
Region Andes
Total speakers 10.4 million (very approximate estimate)
Ranking 69
Language family —

• Quechua

Writing system Latin alphabet
Official status
Official language in Peru and Bolivia.
Regulated by None official
Language codes
ISO 639-1 qu
ISO 639-2 que
ISO 639-3 que – Quechua (generic)
many varieties of Quechua have their own codes.
Map of the Quechuaphone world,
with major to minor Quechua-speaking regions.
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Quechua is a Native American language family spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, 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, although three major regions can be distinguished:

• Ecuador Quechua (usually known there as 'Quichua' or 'Kichwa'), both in the highlands and the Amazon River valley, with pockets also in southern and Amazonian Peru.

• Central Quechua, spoken in the highlands from the Ancash to Huancayo regions in north-central Peru.

• Southern Quechua, with the largest number of speakers, in all regions further south, again mostly highlands: from Huancavelica through the Ayacucho, Cuzco and Puno regions of Peru, across much of Bolivia and in pockets in north-western Argentina.

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 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 or Germanic language families, and more of the order of Slavic or Arabic.

History: Origins and Divergence

To compare with the historically known language families such as Romance, Germanic, Slavic or Arabic, 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.

That is, Quechua had already expanded across wide ranges of the central Andes long even before the Incas, 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. 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.

Quechua's original homeland was not in Cuzco, but further north, in central coast of Peru, exactly in Lima. The debate is closed for the science. Some linguists and archaeologists are moved by stereotypes and refuse the facts. They use to identify Lima with Spain conqueror and consider an insult the origin of Quechua in Lima. Neverthless this zone (Lima and the coast of Perú) has been the cradle of very old cultures before the Spanish conquest. The high culture of Caral (circa 5000 BC) demonstrates this point.

After the Spanish conquest 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 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 and Aymara. Before the arrival of the Spaniards and the introduction of the Latin alphabet, Quechua had no written alphabet. The Incas kept track of numerical data through a system of quipu (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, 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 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. The Hispanicised spellings Quechua and Quichua have been used in Peru and Bolivia since the 17th century, especially after the III Lima Council.

Classification

This macrolanguage 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 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 or Slavic) 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), 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.

Proto-Quechua Quechua I Central Huaylay

Huaylas