How and Why
is Quechua Different in Different Regions?
Contents
Regional Differences in Quechua
Is Quechua One Language, Or Many?
What is a ‘Family’ of Languages?
How Did Original Quechua Change?
So What Became Of Original Quechua?
So Which Region Speaks ‘Proper’ Quechua Now?
Which Regions’ Quechuas are Most Similar and Most Different to Each Other?
How Long Ago Was Original Quechua Spoken?
When Did Quechua Spread to Where it is Spoken Now?
How Did Quechua Get to Where It is Spoken Now?
Where Did Original Quechua Come From?
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Back to Contents – Skip to Next: Is Quechua One Language Or Many?
Regional Differences in Quechua
It is well known that Quechua is spoken widely in several countries in the Andes, particularly in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, but also in northern Argentina and by small numbers of people in other countries. It is also well known, though, that Quechua is not by any means the same everywhere. The Quechua in one country or region can be quite different, sometimes very different, to the Quechua spoken in another country, or even in another region of the same country (especially in Peru). Let’s start by listening, on your computer, to a couple of examples of the differences between the Quechua spoken in different regions.
We’ll begin with the Quechua spoken in just two particular places in Peru, which happen to illustrate the differences well. It so happens, too, that both of them have been designated by the United Nations’ Cultural Organisation (unesco) as ‘World Heritage Sites’, in recognition of their great importance in the history and culture of the Andes. These two places are:
• Cuzco, the old Inca capital in Southern Peru;
• Chavín de Huantar, in the Ancash department of central Peru, home to one of the oldest cultures in the Andes, many centuries before the Incas.
[For more details on any of
the regions we talk about here, including photos of each one, go to our Quechua Regions page.]
To hear how people who speak Quechua in each of these regions would say their Quechua words for three and here, just move your mouse over any of the below (or if you don’t hear anything, try clicking on them).
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three |
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here |
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* If you can’t hear anything on your
computer, click for tips on how to play sound
recordings
As you can hear straight away, these words are pronounced very differently in these two different regions of Peru. If you speak Quechua from another different region or country, then your own form of Quechua may be either similar or different to either or both of these. Most Quechua speakers in Bolivia, for example, do pronounce these words in a very similar way to Cuzco. Here are the pronunciations in the Sucre region of Bolivia, for instance:
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three |
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here |
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In most of Ecuador, meanwhile, such as in the Chimborazo province in the central highlands, and in many other regions of Peru like Ayacucho and Huancavelica, the word for three sounds slightly different to Cuzco and Bolivia, though the word for here is pronounced the same:
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three |
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here |
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You can already hear that there is a lot of diversity here. In fact, as we look at more and more words, the relationships between the different regional forms of Quechua become more and more complicated: in which words they pronounce the same and which they pronounce differently, in exactly how similar or different their pronunciations are to each other, and so on.
One useful way to think of these different regional varieties of Quechua is to compare them to a human family. We can consider that Quechua of Cuzco and Sucre are ‘sisters’ of each other. Ecuador Quechua, though, is more different, because it is only their ‘cousin’, not another sister. The Quechua varieties of Central Peru like Chavín are more different again, because they are even more distant ‘cousins once removed’ within the very big, extended Quechua family. More on this soon below.
Back to Contents – Skip to Next: What Is A Family Of Languages?
Is Quechua One Language, Or Many?
Let’s go back to the biggest difference we’ve met so far: the pronunciation of here in and in . In fact part of the difference here is not just in pronunciation, but in grammar. The first part of the words is just a question of pronunciation differences in the word for this, [kay] vs. [kee]. The second part is a ‘location’ suffix, to turn this into in this place (i.e. the meaning here), and for this Cuzco uses ‑pi, whereas Chavín uses ‑ĉaw, which it now pronounces [čoo]. These are not just different pronunciations of the same suffix, they are quite different suffixes in any case. (You can see this because Cuzco Quechua does still actually has both forms, because it still uses ‑ĉaw in a few words like pun‑chaw day, and in fact both occur alongside each other in chaw‑pi middle.)
People in Cuzco and Chavín can still understand quite a lot of each other’s words, so long as they happen to be ones that are not pronounced too differently, such as for example the words for hand, pronounced pretty much identically [maki] in almost all regions: as you can tell here for , , , and . They might even be able to understand occasional short phrases in each others’ Quechua, but certainly they cannot understand complete conversations. There are simply too many differences between these two regions, in the pronunciation of a great many words, and on other levels too, in vocabulary and in grammar. (Obviously, in Sounds of the Andean Languages we concentrate on the differences in pronunciation. If you wish to learn about differences in vocabulary and grammar too, then go to our More Details About Quechua page.)
In the end, there are so many differences between Cuzco Quechua and Chavín Quechua that the people from these two regions cannot really understand each other well at all when each of them is speaking his or her own native variety of Quechua. In fact, the forms of Quechua spoken in these regions are so different that we can’t even properly call them varieties of the same single Quechua language. So to be strict it is more accurate to talk of Quechua instead as is a ‘family’ of several different related languages.
Back to Contents – Skip to Next: What Is Original Quechua?
What is a ‘Family’ of Languages?
What does it mean to call Quechua a ‘family’ of related languages? The first thing to notice is that it is entirely normal for a language to belong to a wider family: most languages in the world are like this. A well-known example is the language of another great civilisation, Chinese. This too is not really one language but a family of related languages, such as Mandarin Chinese (spoken in the capital, Beijing), Cantonese (spoken further south in Hong Kong), and so on. The same goes for Arabic, which is also really more of a language family than a single language: the Arabic spoken in Morocco in North Africa is very different from that spoken in Saudi Arabia, for instance. In fact, almost all languages known today are members of one language family or another.
The second important point is that when we say that languages are related to each other in a family of languages, this does not just mean that they are similar in any old way. One can often find languages that appear to be similar in some respects, especially in their structure, but which are not actually related at all. One good example is Aymara and Quechua: these are very similar in some aspects of the structure and their pronunciation, but they are probably not related at all. Even Quechua and Spanish can be described as ‘similar’ in one way, in that they have borrowed lots of words from each other: Spanish has borrowed Quechua puma, kancha, llama, waka (‘huaca’), and so on; and Quechua has borrowed Spanish words like karru (from carro, car) and waka (from vaca, cow). But any language can borrow words from any other; again, this does not mean that they are actually related languages. Quechua and Spanish are definitely not.
Related languages are by no means just ‘any languages that might look a bit similar’, then. To say that a group of languages are related means far more than that: it means that they all form the same ‘family’ of languages. This is something like a human family, in which the various children all have the same mother. Take Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian, Catalan, and others: these are quite different languages from each other now, but originally they all started out from the same ‘mother’ or ancestor language: Latin. All these languages together form what is the best-known of all language families, called the Romance family (because their common ancestor language Latin was the one spoken by the Romans). Think back to how the pronunciations of the word for three differ from one regional variety of the Quechua family to the next; and now listen to how just the same happens for this word in the various languages of the Romance family, and of another well-known European language family called Germanic.
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Germanic |
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*[kimsa] |
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*[tre:s] |
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*[θriyiz] |
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[kimsa] |
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[trεs] |
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[θŗi:] |
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[kima] |
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[treiš] |
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[dri:] |
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[kimsa] |
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[trε] |
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[dRai] |
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[kinsa] |
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[tRwa] |
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[tRe] |
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[treiə] |
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In these tables we have also written in green text inside [brackets] exactly how each word is pronounced. The normal alphabet does not have enough letters to show small differences in pronunciation, so to be more exact we use some special ‘phonetic symbols’. To see and hear the exact sounds that the various symbols represent, click here.
Back to Contents – Skip to Next: How Did Original Quechua Change?
What Is ‘Original Quechua’?
Quechua is very similar to Romance, then: it is not just one single language, but a family of closely related and very similar languages. What this means is that at one time in the past, there used to be a single ‘Original Quechua’ language (the one that linguists call by a technical name, Proto-Quechua). We’ll be talking a lot about Original Quechua here, trying to see whether we can answer the questions about where and when it was spoken, and who by. For now, let’s be careful, and not jump to conclusions. It is better to start off by not automatically assuming that the answers must be Cuzc