Cusco Quechua
Cusco Quechua is a dialect of Southern Quechua spoken in Cusco and the Department of Cusco of Peru.
It is the Quechua variety used by the Academia Mayor de la [Lengua Quechua] in Cusco, which also prefers the Spanish-based five-vowel alphabet. On the other hand, the official alphabet used by the ministry of education has only three vowels.
Phonology
Vowels
Quechua only has three vowel phonemes: and, with no diphthongs. Monolingual speakers pronounce them as respectively, but Spanish realizations may also be found. When the vowels appear adjacent to uvular consonants, they are rendered more like , respectively. There is debate about whether Cusco Quechua has five or three vowel phonemes:.While historically Proto-Quechua clearly had just three vowel phonemes /*a, *ɪ, *ʊ/, and although some other Quechua varieties have an increased number of vowels as a result of phonological vowel length emergence or of monophthongization, the current debate about the Cusco variety seems to be not phonological in matter but just orthographic.
| Phoneme | IPA Phonetic realizations | 3-vowel alphabet | 5-vowel alphabet |
| a | a | ||
| i | i , e | ||
| u | u , o |
Consonants
of the tap results in a trill.About 30% of the modern Quechua vocabulary is borrowed from Spanish, and some Spanish sounds may have become phonemic even among monolingual Quechua speakers.