A South American Indian language of the AndeanEquatorial group. The official language of the Incas, it is now spoken by 8 million from Colombia to Chile, and is widely used as a lingua franca. It has a literary history which dates from the 17th-c.
| Pronunciation: | IPA: ['qʰeʃ.wa 'si.mi] ['χetʃ.wa 'ʃi.mi] [kitʃ.wa 'ʃi.mi] [ʔitʃ.wa 'ʃi.mi] ['ɾu.nɑ 'si.mi] | |
| Spoken in: | Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru | |
| Region: | Andes | |
| Total speakers: | 10,000,000 | |
| Ranking: | 83 | |
| Language family: | Quechuan | |
| Writing system: | Latin alphabet | |
| Official status | ||
|---|---|---|
| Official language of: | Bolivia and Peru | |
| Regulated by: | none | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | qu | |
| ISO 639-2: | que | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: |
que — Quechua (generic) many varieties of Quechua have their own codes. |
|
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Quechua (Runa Simi; It was the language of the Inca Empire, and is today spoken in various dialects by some 10 million people throughout South America, including Peru and Bolivia, southern Colombia and Ecuador, north-western Argentina and northern Chile. Notable grammatical features include bipersonal conjugation (verbs agree with both subject and object), evidentiality (indication of the source and veracity of knowledge), a topic particle, and suffixes indicating who benefits from an action and the speaker's attitude toward it.
Today, it has the status of an official language in both Peru and Bolivia, along with Spanish and Aymara.
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. 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. The 2001 Ecuador census seems to be a prominent example of underreporting, as it comes up with only 499,292 speakers of the two varieties Quichua and Kichwa combined, where other sources estimate between 1.5 and 2.2 million speakers.
Vocabulary
A number of Quechua loanwords have entered English via Spanish, including coca, condor, guano, jerky, llama, pampa, puma, quinine, quinoa, vicuña and possibly gaucho.
Consonants
| labial | alveolar | palatal | velar | uvular | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plosive | p | t | tʃ | k | q | |
| fricative | s | h | ||||
| nasal | m | n | ɲ | |||
| lateral | l | ʎ | ||||
| flap | ɾ | |||||
| semivowel | w | j |
The language is spelled as the IPA apart from the palatal consonants /tʃ ɲ ʎ j/ which are spelled <ch ñ ll y> 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 most common dialects: Ayacucho Quechua and Qusqu-Qullaw Quechua (spoken in Cusco, Puno, Bolivia, and Argentina). For instance:
| Ayacucho | Cusco | Southern Quechua | Translation |
|---|---|---|---|
| upyay | uhyay | upyay | "to drink" |
| utqa | usqha | utqha | "fast" |
| llamkay | llank'ay | llamk'ay | "to work" |
| ñuqanchik | nuqanchis | ñuqanchik | "we (inclusive)" |
| -chka- | -sha- | -chka- | (progressive suffix) |
| punchaw | p'unchay | p'unchaw | "day" |
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. vertical-align: center;">
| Number | |||
| Singular | Plural | ||
| Person | First | Ñuqa |
Ñuqanchik (inclusive)
Ñuqayku (exclusive) |
| Second | Qam | Qamkuna | |
| Third | Pay | Paykuna | |
In Quechua, there are seven pronouns. 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. The endings for the indicative are:
| Present | Past | Future | Pluperfect | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ñuqa | -ni | -rqa-ni | -saq | -sqa-ni |
| Qam | -nki | -rqa-nki | -nki | -sqa-nki |
| Pay | -n | -rqa-n | -nqa | -sqa |
| Ñuqanchik | -nchik | -rqa-nchik | -su-nchik | -sqa-nchik |
| Ñuqayku | -yku | -rqa-yku | -saq-ku | -sqa-yku |
| Qamkuna | -nki-chik | -rqa-nki-chik | -nki-chik | -sqa-nki-chik |
| Paykuna | -n-ku | -rqa-nku | -nqa-ku | -sqa-ku |
To these are added various interfixes and suffixes to change the meaning.
Trivia
The fictional Huttese language in the Star Wars movies is largely based upon Quechua and the Rodian language.
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