Quechua

How the Inca and the church spread it

Quechua had spread across the central Andes long before the Inca, who spoke one form of it among many and then promoted it as the language of their empire. The Cusco variety carries heavy Aymara influence. After the Spanish conquest the colonial administration recognised Quechua, and the Catholic clergy used it to evangelise. The oldest written records are by the missionary Domingo de Santo Tomás, whose grammar appeared in 1560.

In the late 18th century, after the Túpac Amaru II rebellion, colonial officials banned it from public use in Peru. Its prestige fell after independence, and it retreated to isolated rural areas.

Is Quechua one language or several

The varieties split into Quechua I, central, and Quechua II, peripheral, and speakers of Central and Southern Quechua cannot understand each other well. That lack of mutual intelligibility is why Quechua is treated as a family. Ethnologue lists 45 varieties. The whole family is about as diverse as Slavic or Arabic.

How many vowels should Quechua spell

Peru adopted a new spelling in 1975 that wrote Inca as Inka, separated k from q and marked aspirated and ejective stops, but kept five vowels. A 1985 revision cut them to the three of Quechua, so Qollasuyu became Qullasuyu. The choice is still argued over in Peru. Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino has proposed a Standard Quechua for the whole south, drawing on Ayacucho and Cusco.

Official status in Bolivia came with the 2009 constitution, which recognised Quechua and several other indigenous languages. Quechua is mostly spoken, not written, since books and newspapers in it are scarce.