Have you ever used the following words: cocoa, condor, gaucho, guano, jerky, llama, puma, or quinine? Then you already know some Quechua! And there are many others words that have entered English from Quechua.
Quechua is an indigenous language of South America. It is spoken by more than 13 million people in the Andes, including Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and parts of Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. It falls into the Andean-Equatorial family, the Aymara-Quechua branch. According to Ethnologue, there are a minimum of 46 dialects, many of which are not mutually intelligible. These are grouped into Quecha IA, IB, IIA, and IIB.
Presently, most linguists believe that Quechua was not the primary language spoken by the Incan conquerors (and please note that “Inca” actually only refers to the royalty of this civilization—the actual name is unlikely to be discovered), but rather a trading language that spread across the region along with the mullu (bead) trade. Thus the Incan conquerors “caught up” to Quechua, and as a language already used in trade, it became the easiest form of communication within the expanding empire.
Going further back in time, there is discussion about Quechumaran, a proto-style language that may have been the ancestor of both Quechua and Aymara. Present evidence neither proves nor disproves this theory.
This thread will concern itself primarily with Quichua, not Quechua. Quichua is from the Quechua IIB group (14 dialects), and is used when speaking about Quechua usage in Ecuador. Even within Ecuador, a variety of dialects are used, a fact which prompted Ecuador to produce a standard “national” Quichua language. Today this is referred to as Unified Quichua. Insofar as possible, this course will concentrate on Unified Quichua. Should interest arise, it may also deviate into Amazonian dialects and the unrelated Shuar.