Quechua languages

Quechua (endonym: Runa Simi) is a Native South American language family and dialect cluster 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 8 to 10 million speakers (estimates vary widely).^[1] At the time of the conquest, the Incans referred to their language as "runasimi", only later to be mistakenly called quechua by conquistadors. Many contemporary Andean Quechua speakers still call it "runasimi" (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 Quechuan 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 makes it nearly impossible to put a precise number on how many different Quechua languages or dialects there are; the Ethnologue lists 44.^[2] 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 entails considering 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 widespread and decided that this was a tool to achieve the unification of the Empire; thus, the language began to spread across the Andes more enthusiastically.

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 languages like Aymara. This fact explains that the Cuzco variety was not the more widespread. In similar way, a diverse group of dialects appeared while the Inca Empire ruled and imposed Quechua.

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. However, the administrative and religious use of Quechua was terminated when it was banned from public use in Peru in the late 18th century in response to the Túpac Amaru II rebellion^[3] – even "loyal" pro-Catholic texts such as Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales were banned.^[4] Despite a brief revival immediately after independence, the prestige of Quechua decreased sharply and it gradually became restricted to rural areas.^[5]

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. ^{[2] [6] [7]}

Current status

Today, Quechua has the status of an official language in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador along with Spanish and in the first two also with 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.

In recent years, Quechua has been introduced in Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, which is, however reaching only a part of the Quechua-speaking population.

In spite of a growing realization of its value as a national symbol and vehicle of native culture in the respective countries, there is an ongoing process of Quechua-speaking populations shifting to Spanish for the purposes of social advancement.^[8]

Quechua and Spanish are now heavily intermixed, with many hundreds of Spanish loanwords in 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), misi (cat), waska (strap, or thrashing) are as commonly used as their Spanish counterparts, even in entirely Spanish-speaking areas. Quechua has also had a profound impact on other native languages of the Americas, for example Mapudungun.

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".^[9]

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.

Today the various local pronunciations of Quechua include [ˈqʰeʃwa ˈsimi], [ˈχetʃwa ˈʃimi], [ˈkitʃwa ˈʃimi], [ˈʔitʃwa ˈʃimi].

Classification

The varieties of Quechua are subdivided as follows, 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 Quechuan 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); and 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
  • Yungay 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.

Geographical distribution

Quechua I or Waywash is spoken in Peru's central highlands. It is the most diverse branch of Quechua,^[10] 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) 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.

Cognates

A sampling of words in several Quechua dialects:

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 (2007) 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 (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: 3,262,100 (2007 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 have entered English via Spanish, including ayahuasca, coca, cóndor, guano, jerky, llama, pampa, puma, quinine, quinoa, vicuña and possibly gaucho. The word lagniappe comes from the Quechuan 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", chuchaqui for "hangover" in Ecuador, and diverse borrowings for "altitude sickness", in Bolivia from Quechuan 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 Quechuan 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 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 (0), 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.^[11] 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".^[12] 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 – i.e. it is unknown), facing the past (we can see it – i.e. 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:

The suffixes shown in the table above usually indicate the subject; the person of the object is also indicated by a suffix (-a- for first person and -su- for second person), which precedes the suffixes in the table. In such cases, the plural suffixes from the table (-chik and -ku) can be used to express the number of the object rather than the subject.

Various suffixes are added to the stem 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 the body of literature in Quechua is not as sizable as its historical and present-day prominence would suggest, it is nevertheless not negligible.

As in the case of the Mesoamerican civilizations, there are a number of surviving Andean documents in the local language that were written down in Latin characters after the European conquest, but which express to a great extent the culture of pre-conquest times. The Quechua literature of this type is somewhat scantier, but nevertheless significant. It includes the so-called Huarochiri manuscript (1598), describing the mythology and religion of the valley of Huarochiri, as well as Quechua poems quoted within the Spanish-language texts of some chronicles dealing with the pre-conquest period. There are a number of anonymous or signed Quechua dramas dating from the post-conquest period (starting from the 17th century), some of which deal with the Inca era, while most are on religious topics and of European inspiration. The most famous of these dramas are Ollanta and the plays describing the death of Atahualpa. For example, Juan de Espinosa Medrano wrote several dramas in the language. Poems in Quechua were also composed during the colonial period.^[13][14]

Dramas and poems continued to be written in the 19th and especially in 20th centuries as well; in addition, in the 20th century and more recently, more prose has been published. While some of that literature consists of original compositions (poems and dramas), the bulk of 20th century Quechua literature consists of traditional folk stories and oral narratives.^[14] Johnny Payne has translated two sets of Quechua oral short stories, one into Spanish and the other into English.

Many Andean musicians write and sing in their native languages, including Quechua and Aymara. Notable musical groups are Los Kjarkas, Kala Marka, J'acha Mallku, Savia Andina, Wayna Picchu, Wara and many others.

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 the Quechua people, 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 Quechuas.
• 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 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 books The Seven Crystal Balls and its sequel Prisoners of the Sun, 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.
• On the TV cartoon series The Emperor's New School, the main and other characters have quechua names as Kuzco (Cusco, that means "navel of the world"), Pacha (ground) and Chicha (kind of beer).

See also

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

Notes

References

Notes

Further reading

External links

• Course of Classical Quechua as used in the Manuscript of Huarochiri
• El Quechua de Santiago del Estero, extensive site covering the grammar of Argentinian Quechua (in 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.
• Toponimos del Quechua de Yungay, Peru
• Sacred Hymns of Pachacutec
• 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
• Cuzco and Bolivian Quechua being compared, with English translations
• Modelling the Quechua-Aymara relationship. Pieter Muysken

Dictionaries

• Diccionario Quechua: Español–Runasimi–English Dictionary of Ayacucho Quechua from Clodoaldo Soto Ruiz. It explains Quechua words in Quechua itself and in Spanish and English.
• 5 Quechua dictionaries online
• runasimi.de Multilingual Quechua website with online dictionary (xls) Quechua–German–English–Spanish.
• Quechua Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
• Multilingual Dictionary: Spanish–Quechua (Cusco, Ayacucho, Junín, Ancash) – Aymara