Quechua was the official language of
Tawantinsuyu (the
Incan Empire) and is spoken today by approximately 13 million people in
Bolivia,
Peru,
Ecuador, Northern
Chile,
Argentina, and Southern
Colombia. Quechua was the language of the
Incas, and is the most widely spoken
Amerindian language. It was extended beyond the limits of the empire by the
Catholic church, which chose it to preach to Indians in the
Andes area. It's a co-official language in Bolivia and Peru.
Quechua is a perfectly regular language, but a large number of infixes and suffixes change both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning, allowing great expressiveness. It includes grammatical features such as bipersonal conjugation and conjugation dependent on mental state and veracity of knowledge, spatial and temporal relationships, and many cultural factors.
A number of Quechua
loanwords have entered
Spanish and, by that route,
English. The most prominent are
coca,
condor,
guano and
gaucho. The word
lagniappe comes from the Quechua word
nyap ("something extra") with the article
la in front of it,
la ñapa, in Spanish. Perhaps the most unexpected
loanword is
sweater, from the Quechua word
chompa, meaning "a loose, outer jacket".
Quechua has only three vowels:
/i/,
/a/, and
/u/, similar to
Classical Arabic. These are usually pronounced roughly as in
Spanish, however, when the closed vowels
/i/ and
/u/ appear adjacent to the uvular consonants
/q/,
/q'/, and
/qh/, they are rendered more like
[e] and
[o] respectively.
The consonant inventory seems a bit strange to Indo-European speakers. None of the plosives or fricatives are voiced; voicing is not phonemic in Quechua. However, in many dialects, each plosive has three forms: simple, with glottal stop, and with aspiration. For example:
simple glottal stop aspirated
p p' ph
t t' th
ch ch' chh
k k' kh
q q' qh