Here, some of the most common questions regarding the language of the Incas, a language that you may have not even heard its name in your life. So, why not some facts before starting with the vocabulary lists?
Actually, Quechua is not a single language, but a family. We are not going to discuss how linguistics have classified it, but it’s important to know that are two main groups: Quechua I or central, and Quechua II or peripheral. The last one is the most spread but contains multiple dialects. I’ll be focusing in the southern dialects of Quechua II, especially on those called Ayacucho Quechua and Cusco Quechua.
Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and part of Chile and Colombia. It has official status only in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. As you see, it is spoken through the areas that once formed part of the Inca Empire.
How many people speak Quechua?
The real data is unavailable due to the lack of a census in the last years. But according to our last sources and linguistics works the total number would be over 10 million people today.
The Incas did not develop a script for their language. Today, Quechua was adapted to fit in the Latin alphabet, common to many European languages.
Unfortunately, a problem is that there is not a single way of writing the different sounds, and there have been many attempts to unify the orthography, but many have failed. On my case, I will try to use the “Standard Quechua”, created by the linguist Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino.
Does it look like any other more spread language?
Quechua grammar and vocabulary is not alike any European language, nor Asian, nor African. The closest family is the Aymara languages, which were and are also spoken in South America.
However, a lot of vocabularies have entered to Quechua from Spanish and vice versa. In Bolivia, particularly, Quechua words are used extensively even by non-Quechua speakers.
Quechua’s phonology varies between the different dialects, but as I’ve said, I’m focusing on the Southern Quechua.
From my point of view, Quechua shares many sounds with Spanish, and thank the new rules of orthography, one could say that every sound has only one way to be written. That is, pronunciation can be determined from spelling.
Quechua is a highly-agglutinative language. Eg:
Buwisninkukunapaq: for their oxes
Quechua has not articles.
Quechua has various cases, and uses them instead of prepositions or postpositions.
All the nouns have a regular declination, and all the verbs have a regular conjugation.
Like English, adjective lack gender and number, and are placed before the noun.
There are plenty of suffixes, and many of them aren’t directly translated to other languages.
There are topic and comment suffixes.
Many of those suffixes show the speaker intentions or moods, so Quechua becomes a very expressive language.
Usually, the common word order is SOV.
