Quechuan languages
Quechua, also called Runa simi in Southern Quechua, is an indigenous language family that originated in central Peru and thereafter spread to other countries of the Andes. Derived from a common ancestral "Proto-Quechua" language, it is the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language family of the Americas, with an estimated 8–10 million speakers in 2004, and just under 7 million from the most recent census data available up to 2011. Approximately 13.9% of Peruvians speak a Quechua language.
Although Quechua began expanding many centuries before the Incas, that previous expansion also meant that it was the primary language family within the Inca Empire. The Spanish tolerated its use until the Peruvian struggle for independence in the 1780s. As a result, various Quechua languages are still widely spoken, being the majority language in a number of regions of Peru, the most-spoken or co-official language in many others, and, as the Kichwa language, the second most-spoken language of Ecuador, after Spanish.
History
The Quechua linguistic homeland may have been Central Peru. It has been speculated that it may have been used in the Chavín and Wari civilizations.Quechua had already expanded across wide ranges of the central Andes long before the expansion of the Inca Empire. The Inca were one among many peoples in present-day Peru who already spoke a form of Quechua, which in the Cuzco region particularly has been heavily influenced by Aymara, hence some of the characteristics that still distinguish the Cuzco form of Quechua today. Diverse Quechua regional dialects and languages had already developed in different areas, influenced by local languages, before the Inca Empire expanded and further promoted Quechua as the official language of the Empire.
After the Spanish conquest of Peru in the 16th century, Quechua continued to be used widely by the indigenous peoples as the "common language". It was officially recognized by the Spanish administration, and many Spaniards learned it in order to communicate with local peoples. The clergy of the Catholic Church adopted Quechua to use as the language of evangelization. The oldest written records of the language are by missionary Domingo de Santo Tomás, who arrived in Peru in 1538 and learned the language from 1540. He published his Grammatica o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los reynos del Perú in 1560. Given its use by the Catholic missionaries, the range of Quechua continued to expand in some areas.
In the late 18th century, colonial officials ended the administrative and religious use of Quechua. They banned it from public use in Peru after the Túpac Amaru II rebellion of indigenous peoples. The Crown banned "loyal" pro-Catholic texts in Quechua, such as Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales.
Despite a brief revival of the language immediately after the Latin American nations achieved independence in the 19th century, the prestige of Quechua had decreased sharply. Gradually its use declined so that it was spoken mostly by indigenous people in the more isolated and conservative rural areas. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, Quechua language speakers number roughly 7 million people across South America, more than any other indigenous language family in the Americas.
As a result of Inca expansion into Central Chile, there were bilingual Quechua-Mapudungu Mapuche in Central Chile at the time of the Spanish arrival. It has been argued that Mapuche, Quechua, and Spanish coexisted in Central Chile, with significant bilingualism, during the 17th century. Alongside Mapudungun, Quechua is the indigenous language that has influenced Chilean Spanish the most.
Quechua-Aymara and mixed Quechua-Aymara-Mapudungu toponymy can be found as far south as Osorno Province in Chile.
In 2017 the first thesis defense done in Quechua in Europe was done by Peruvian Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez at Pablo de Olavide University. The same year Pablo Landeo wrote the first novel in Quechua without a Spanish translation. A Peruvian student, Roxana Quispe Collantes of the University of San Marcos, completed and defended the first thesis in the language group in 2019; it concerned the works of poet Andrés Alencastre Gutiérrez and it was also the first non-Spanish native language thesis done at that university.
Currently, there are different initiatives that promote Quechua in the Andes and across the world: many universities offer Quechua classes, a community-based organization such as Elva Ambía's Quechua Collective of New York promote the language, and governments are training interpreters in Quechua to serve in healthcare, justice, and bureaucratic facilities.
Current status
In 1975, Peru became the first country to recognize Quechua as one of its official languages. Ecuador conferred official status on the language in its 2006 constitution, and in 2009, Bolivia adopted a new constitution that recognized Quechua and several other indigenous languages as official languages of the country.The major obstacle to the usage and teaching of Quechua languages is the lack of written materials, such as books, newspapers, software, and magazines. The Bible has been translated into Quechua and is distributed by certain missionary groups. Quechua, along with Aymara and minor indigenous languages, remains essentially a spoken language.
In recent years, Quechua has been introduced in intercultural bilingual education in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Even in these areas, the governments are reaching only a part of the Quechua-speaking populations. Some indigenous people in each of the countries are having their children study in Spanish for social advancement.
Radio Nacional del Perú broadcasts news and agrarian programs in Quechua for periods in the mornings.
Quechua and Spanish are now heavily intermixed in much of the Andean region, with many hundreds of Spanish loanwords in Quechua. Similarly, Quechua phrases and words are commonly used by Spanish speakers. In southern rural Bolivia, for instance, many Quechua words such as wawa, misi, waska, are as commonly used as their Spanish counterparts, even in entirely Spanish-speaking areas. Quechua has also had a significant influence on other native languages of the Americas, such as Mapuche.
Number of speakers
It is difficult to measure the number of Quechua speakers. The number of speakers given varies widely according to the sources. The total in Ethnologue 16 is 10 million, primarily based on figures published 1987–2002, but with a few dating from the 1960s. The figure for Imbabura Highland Quechua in Ethnologue, for example, is 300,000, an estimate from 1977.The missionary organization FEDEPI, on the other hand, estimated one million Imbabura dialect speakers. Census figures are also problematic, due to under-reporting. The 2001 Ecuador census reports only 500,000 Quechua speakers, compared to the estimate in most linguistic sources of more than 2 million. The censuses of Peru and Bolivia are thought to be more reliable.
- Argentina: 900,000
- Bolivia: 2,100,000 ; 2,800,000 South Bolivian
- Chile: few, if any; 8,200 in ethnic group
- Colombia: 4,402 to 16,000
- Ecuador: 2,300,000
- Peru: 3,800,000 ; 3,500,000 to 4,400,000
Classification
There are significant differences among the varieties of Quechua spoken in the central Peruvian highlands and the peripheral varieties of Ecuador, as well as those of southern Peru and Bolivia. They can be labeled Quechua I and Quechua II. Within the two groups, there are few sharp boundaries, making them dialect continua.However, there is a secondary division in Quechua II between the grammatically simplified northern varieties of Ecuador, Quechua II-B, known there as Kichwa, and the generally more conservative varieties of the southern highlands, Quechua II-C, which include the old Inca capital of Cusco. The closeness is at least in part because of the influence of Cusco Quechua on the Ecuadorean varieties in the Inca Empire. Because Northern nobles were required to educate their children in Cusco, this was maintained as the prestige dialect in the north.
Speakers from different points within any of the three regions can generally understand one another reasonably well. There are nonetheless significant local-level differences across each. Speakers from different major regions, particularly Central or Southern Quechua, are not able to communicate effectively.
The lack of mutual intelligibility among the dialects is the basic criterion that defines Quechua not as a single language, but as a language family. The complex and progressive nature of how speech varies across the dialect continua makes it nearly impossible to differentiate discrete varieties; Ethnologue lists 45 varieties which are then divided into two groups; Central and Peripheral. Due to the non-intelligibility between the two groups, they are all classified as separate languages.
As a reference point, the overall degree of diversity across the family is a little less than that of the Romance or Germanic families, and more of the order of Slavic or Arabic. The greatest diversity is within Central Quechua, or Quechua I, which is believed to lie close to the homeland of the ancestral Proto-Quechua language.
Family tree
devised the traditional classification, the three divisions above, plus a fourth, a northern or Peruvian branch. The latter causes complications in the classification, however, as various dialects have features of both Quechua I and Quechua II, and so are difficult to assign to either.Torero classifies them as the following:
- Quechuan
- * Quechua I or Quechua B, ''Central Quechua or Waywash, spoken in Peru's central highlands and coast.
- ** The most widely spoken varieties are Huaylas, Huaylla Wanca, and Conchuco
- * 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, northern Peru, and Colombia
- *** The most widely spoken varieties in this group are Chimborazo Highland Quichua and Imbabura Highland Quichua.
- ** Southern Quechua or Quechua II C,'' spoken in Bolivia, Chile, southern Peru and Northwest Argentina.
- *** The most widely spoken varieties are South Bolivian, Cusco, Ayacucho, and Puno.
Landerman does not believe a true genetic classification is possible and divides Quechua II so that the family has four geographical–typological branches: Northern, North Peruvian, Central, and Southern. He includes Chachapoyas and Lamas in North Peruvian Quechua so Ecuadorian is synonymous with Northern Quechua.