"Quechuan" redirects here. Not to be confused with Quechan, Quechan language, or Quiché.
Quechuan
Kechua / Runa Simi
Ethnicity
Quechua
Geographic distribution
Throughout the central Andes Mountains including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
Native speakers
7.2 million[1]
Linguistic classification
One of the world's primary language families
Subdivisions
Quechua I
Quechua II
ISO 639-1
qu
ISO 639-2 / 5
que
ISO 639-3
que
Glottolog
quec1387
Map showing the distribution of Quechuan languages
Map showing the current distribution of the Quechuan languages (solid gray) and the historical extent of the Inca Empire (shaded)
Person
Runa / Nuna
People
Runakuna / Nunakuna
Language
Runasimi / Nunasimi
Quechua (/ˈkɛtʃuə/,[2][3]Spanish:[ˈketʃwa]), also called Runasimi ("people's language") in Southern Quechua, is an indigenous language family that originated in central Peru and thereafter spread to other countries of the Andes.[4][5][6][7] Derived from a common ancestral "Proto-Quechua" language,[4] it is today the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language family of the Americas, with the number of speakers estimated at 8–10 million speakers in 2004,[8] and just under 7 million from the most recent census data available up to 2011.[9] Approximately 13.9% (3.7 million) of Peruvians speak a Quechua language.[10]
Although Quechua began expanding many centuries before[4][5][6][11][7] the Incas, that previous expansion also meant that it was the primary language family within the Inca Empire. The Spanish also tolerated its use until the Peruvian struggle for independence in the 1780s. As a result, various Quechua languages are still widely spoken today, being co-official in many regions and the most spoken language lineage in Peru, after Spanish.
^Quechuan at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
^"Longman Dictionary".
^Oxford Living Dictionaries, British and World English
^ abcCerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (2003). Lingüística quechua. Monumenta lingüística andina (2. ed.). Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas. ISBN 978-9972-691-59-1.
^ abAdelaar, Willem F. H.; Muysken, Pieter (2004). The languages of the Andes. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge (G.B.): Cambridge University press. ISBN 978-0-521-36275-7.
^ abTorero, Alfredo (2002). Idiomas de los Andes: linguistica e historia. Travaux de l'Institut Français d'études andines. Lima: Instituto Francés de estudios andinos Editorial horizonte. ISBN 978-9972-699-27-6.
^ abHeggarty, Paul; Beresford-Jones, David, eds. (2012-05-17). Archaeology and Language in the Andes (1 ed.). British Academy. doi:10.5871/bacad/9780197265031.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-726503-1.
^Adelaar 2004, pp. 167–168, 255.
^Howard, Rosaleen (2011), Heggarty, Paul; Pearce, Adrian J. (eds.), "The Quechua Language in the Andes Today: Between Statistics, the State, and Daily Life", History and Language in the Andes, Studies of the Americas, New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, pp. 189–213, doi:10.1057/9780230370579_9, ISBN 978-0-230-37057-9, retrieved 2024-01-09
^"Perú Resultados Definitivos de los Censos Nacionales". Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática. 2017. Archived from the original on Apr 6, 2023. Retrieved 12 December 2023.
^Heggarty, Paul (October 2007). "Linguistics for Archaeologists: Principles, Methods and the Case of the Incas". Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 17 (3): 311–340. doi:10.1017/S095977430700039X. ISSN 0959-7743. S2CID 59132956.
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Quechumaran or Kechumaran is a language-family proposal that unites Quechua and Aymara. Quechuanlanguages, especially those of the south, share a large...
official spelling for place-names originating from Aymara and the Quechuanlanguages. A standardized alphabet for done Quechua was adopted by the Peruvian...
word in the Quechuanlanguages, which are spoken in the Andean states of Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia—speakers of Quechuanlanguages who use modern...
Indigenous languages regardless of ancestry. In 20th- and 21st-century Peru, the nationalization of Quechuanlanguages and Aymaran languages as "official...
language isolates by continent Lists of languages List of proposed language families "What are the largest language families?". Ethnologue. May 25, 2019...
more than 5 million speakers. The term Southern Quechua refers to the Quechuan varieties spoken in regions of the Andes south of a line roughly east–west...
In the Quechuanlanguages of South America, a huaca or wak'a is an object that represents something revered, typically a monument of some kind. The term...
exploitative move best made by one whose first language was Quechua, if at all". A language based on the Quechuanlanguages, Huttese is a lingua franca in the Star...
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