Quechua (
Runa Simi) is a
Native American language of
South America. It was already widely spoken across the Central Andes long before the time of the
Incas, who established it as the official language of administration for their Empire, and is still spoken today in various regional forms (the so-called ‘
dialects’) by some 10 million people through much of South America, including
Peru, south-western and central
Bolivia, southern
Colombia and
Ecuador, north-western
Argentina and northern
Chile. It is the most widely spoken language of the
indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Quechua is a very regular agglutinative language, as opposed to a fusional one. Its normal sentence order is SOV (subject-object-verb). Its large number of suffixes changes both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning. 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.
The various dialects of Quechua were widely spoken throughout the Andes long before the rise of the Inca state in the 15th century. The Incas made one dialect of Quechua (Classical Quechua, the ancestor of Southern Quechua) their official language; as they expanded their empire by conquest, this dialect became pre-Columbian Peru's lingua franca, retaining this status after the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.
The oldest records of the language are those of Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, who arrived in Peru in 1538 and learned the language from 1540, publishing his Grammatica o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los reynos del Perú in 1560.
