Adelaar Willem, Muysken Pieter. The languages of the Andes

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174 3 The Inca Sphere

of substratum. The northern branch of the Aymaran family is situated entirely in this

area, in the province of Yauyos. There have been reports dating from the beginning of

the twentieth century of Aymaran-speaking communities as far north as Canta in the

valley of Chill´on (Hardman 1966). Sixteenth-century sources (Santo Tom´as 1560a, b)

indicate that Quechua was the predominant language of the coastal plain of Lima, but

some Aymaran toponymy is suggestive of a more complex language situation. This ob-

servation also holds to a higher degree for the area of Huarochir´ı and San Dami´an de

Checas further inland. This area was the home of an early colonial manuscript written in

Quechua, attributed to the environment of the idolatry ﬁghter Francisco de Avila (see sec-

tion 3.2.11). It depicts a situation in which both a local form of Quechua and an Aymaran

language seem to have coexisted. Cult terms, such as auquisna and chaycasna,

referring

to the celebrations dedicated to Pariacaca and Chaupi˜namca, the two main deities of the

Huarochir´ıregion, and the names of mythical heroes, such as Collquiri and Tutayquiri,

are either Aymaran, or have Aymaran endings. It suggests that an Aymaran language

was used for hieratic purposes. At present, Spanish is the dominant language in the area

of Huarochir´ı. The Hispanicising inﬂuence that radiates from the Lima agglomeration

is cornering the native languages in remote areas of the department of that name, such

as Cajatambo, Checras and Yauyos.

The southern Andes of Peru, also known as the trapecio andino (‘Andean trapezium’),

are widely recognised as the most authentically Indian region of Peru. Its Quechua-

speaking area covers the Andean parts of the departments of Apurimac, Arequipa,

Ayacucho, Cuzco, Huancavelica and (very marginally) Ica. The greater part of the Puno

department and the province of S´anchez Cerro in Moquegua are also Quechua-speaking.

Aymara is found in Puno (provinces of Huancan´e, Chucuito and Juli), Moquegua

(province of Mariscal Nieto) and in the department of Tacna (province of Tarata).

Historical sources and toponymy point toward the presence of Aymaran languages

in most of the area of southern Peru that is now Quechua-speaking. In the Relaciones

geogr´aﬁcas de Indias of 1586 (Jim´enez de la Espada 1965) these languages are referred

to as hahuasimi (Quechua hawa simi ‘outer languages’). The name suggests that this

category included languages of different afﬁliations. However, lexical clues provided by

the same source have permitted the identiﬁcation of at least some of these languages as

members of the Aymaran family (Torero 1970).

In his description of the customs of different populations living in the former Inca em-

pire, the chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala (1615) indicates that an Aymaran language

wasspoken not only in the region situated to the southeast of Cuzco (in the Collasuyo

administrative quarter), but also southwest of the Inca capital (in the Cuntisuyo adminis-

trative quarter). Among other areas, he may have referred to Collaguas,which coincides

Probably from Aymaran *awki-s(a)-na ‘of our father’ and *ˇc

ayka-s(a)-na ‘of our mother’.

3.1 The languages and their distribution 175

with the higher reaches of the Colca river basin in the department of Arequipa, once

a stronghold of the Aymara nation, but entirely Quechuanised today. For a critical as-

sessment of the sources from which our knowledge of the colonial language situation in

southern Peru was derived, as well as the way they have been interpreted, see Mannheim

(1991: 43–7, 249–50).

In the southernmost part of the Peruvian Andes and on the coast there is again evidence

of languages that were neither Quechuan nor Aymaran. Historically, the most widespread

of these languages was Puquina. The classiﬁcation of the Puquina language as a ‘general

language’ during the early colonial period is somewhat surprising in view of its rapid

extinction and the relatively poor state of its documentation. Concentrations of Puquina

toponymy are found in the area between the town of Arequipa and the Peruvian–Chilean

border, along the western and northern shores of Lake Titicaca and on some of its islands

(Taquile, Amantan´ı). The peninsula of Capachica and the neighbouring village of Coata

at the western extremity of the lake were among the last strongholds of Puquina. The

so-called Coli language of the Moquegua region (Julien 1979) may have been a dialect

of Puquina or a language related to it. Puquina contains quite a few Quechua borrowings,

but it does not share the extreme lexical and typological coincidence of the Quechuan and

Aymaran families. Its pronominal system is suggestive of a genetic connection with the

Arawakan language family of the Amazonian lowlands. Some of the Puquina lexicon, or

rather, that of one of its dialects (cf. Torero 1987), survives in the Callahuaya language,

a professional language used by traditional healers of the area of Charazani in Bolivia.

Alongside Puquina, there is the Uru–Chipaya or Uruquilla language family (Torero

1987, 1992). Following de Cr´equi-Montfort and Rivet (1925–7), several authors

(Kingsley Noble 1965; Greenberg 1987) have failed to distinguish between the Uru–

Chipaya family and Puquina (see section 1.7). This misunderstanding is partly due to

the fact that one of the Uru–Chipaya-speaking groups, the Chipaya, have been known

to refer to themselves as ‘Puquina’ or ‘Buquina’ (Olson 1964; Wachtel 1990: 607–8).

However, there is unequivocal evidence that two separate families exist, for which we

shall maintain the usual denominations Puquina and Uru–Chipaya. The Uru–Chipaya-

speaking people stood apart, culturally and economically, from the sedentary Aymara

population that surrounded them. They used to make a living off the lakes by ﬁshing,

hunting and processing totora-reed. The social and religious characteristics of the Uru–

Chipaya people were those of outsiders with respect to Andean society, although the

Chipaya adopted the agriculture-based way of life of their Aymara neighbours. So far,

three Uru–Chipaya languages have been identiﬁed: Chipaya, spoken in an altiplano

village near the Chilean border in the department of La Paz, Bolivia; Uru of Iruitu,

spoken in a Bolivian community near the place where the Desaguadero river reaches the

southern shore of Lake Titicaca; and Uru of Ch’imu, formerly spoken in a lake-shore

township near Ichu, east of Puno (Peru).

176 3 The Inca Sphere

The Andean region of Bolivia is divided between Quechua and Aymara-speaking

areas. The distribution of the two languages exhibits a complicated pattern because the

linguistic boundary is not clear-cut everywhere (Hos´okawa 1980; Alb´o 1995). Aymara

is the predominant language in most of the departments of La Paz and Oruro. The area

of La Paz situated north of Lake Titicaca is shared by Quechua and Aymara speakers. A

similar situation prevails in the protruding northern sector of the department of Potos´ı

(norte de Potos´ı). There are also Aymara-speaking communities in the department of

Cochabamba. Quechua has an even wider distribution in Bolivia than Aymara. It is

spoken in most of Cochabamba, Potos´ı and Sucre, and in substantial areas of La Paz.

The region of Tarija in the south has become Hispanicised.

Virtually nothing is known about the languages that may have been spoken in the

Bolivian highlands before Aymara and Quechua became the main languages there. The

names of local ethnic groups, such as the L´ıpez and the Chicha, were preserved, but

they have not been associated with any particular non-Quechuan or non-Aymaran lan-

guage. The reason for our ignorance is that the Bolivian highlands probably became

Aymaranised several centuries before the expansion of the Incas began. In some lo-

cations, there were pockets of Puquina and Uruquilla (Uru–Chipaya) speakers outside

their traditional habitat. They may have been the result of mitimaes-like migrations.

However, the presence around 1600 of alleged Uruquilla speakers in the remote L´ıpez

region in the western part of the department of Potos´ı (Bouysse-Cassagne 1975) points

towards the survival of a local language which may or may not have been Uru–Chipaya.

Both Ibarra Grasso (1958) and Loukotka (1968) mention the existence of Atacame˜no

(Kunza) speakers in the southwestern corner of Bolivia, a claim that has not so far been

corroborated. A former extension of the Atacame˜no language into the area of L´ıpez

ﬁnds some support in the local toponymy.

In northern Chile, parts of the coastal strip in the regions of Antofagasta and Tarapac´a

were inhabited by the Chango people, who lived from the sea and, according to tradition,

entertained a social relationship with the Uru on the altiplano (Wachtel 1990). Some

words recorded by Bresson in 1875 from Chango established near the town of Paposo

could easily be identiﬁed as pertaining to the Araucanian language of central and south-

ern Chile (d’Ans 1977). Nothing is known about the original language of the Chango,

who reportedly became extinct as a result of a tidal wave. It is possible that the Chango

adopted the Araucanian language in their contacts with Chilean ﬁshermen further

south.

The Chilean province of Antofagasta belonged to Bolivia until the Nitrate War of

the 1870s. In its higher Andean parts, Quechua coexisted with the local Atacame˜no

language, equally known as Kunza or Lican Antai. Atacame˜no was already mori-

bund at the end of the nineteenth century. The language is almost certainly extinct

now, but its memory is kept alive by the local descendants of its speakers. The

3.1 The languages and their distribution 177

Atacame˜no lexicon is relatively well documented, but a grammatical description of

the language is sadly lacking. The extent to which Quechua is spoken in the region

in question has not been fully investigated. There have also been rumours of Quechua

speakers in the Chilean–Argentinian border region much further south (province of

Atacama).

Like most of the Bolivian highlands, northwestern Argentina adopted the Quechua

language. It survives in two distinct non-contiguous areas: the lowland province of

Santiago del Estero and the western, cordilleran part of the provinces of Jujuy and

(probably) Salta. According to de Granda (1993), the autochtonous population of Jujuy

and Salta became fully Hispanicised. He attributes the presence of Quechua speakers in

that area to secondary migrations from Bolivia. Santiague˜no Quechua is now the most

thriving Quechua dialect in Argentina. Its survival is an interesting case, because the

province of Santiago del Estero never seems to have been dominated by the Incas. It

appears that Spanish colonial presence in the Santiago region was initially represented

by Quechua-speaking Indians originally from different parts of the former empire (Bravo

1993). For a while, Quechua was used throughout the northwest of Argentina, in the

present-day provinces of Catamarca, Jujuy, La Rioja, Salta, Santiago del Estero and

Tucum´an, where it partly replaced the local languages Kak´an and Tonocot´e.InCatamarca

and La Rioja, a Quechua dialect (locally called Quichua) survived at least until the ﬁrst

decades of the twentieth century (Nardi 1962), and may still be spoken locally. In central

Argentina, Quechua inﬂuence extended as far south as C´ordoba during the colonial

period.

The presence of the pre-Quechuan languages of northwestern Argentina is more

clearly delineated than that of Bolivia. Aymara speakers are mentioned by most authors

dealing with the language situation in the departments of Jujuy and Salta (e.g. Klein

1985: 706). However, since no exact locations are indicated, one may ask the ques-

tion whether the alleged Aymara speakers are indigenous to the area. In the Andean

region of northwestern Argentina, Diaguita (Kak´an)was probably the non-Quechuan

language with the widest extension. The Diaguita linguistic area, which included parts

of Catamarca, La Rioja, Salta, Santiago del Estero and Tucum´an also extended into

northern Chile, ﬁlling the intermediate area between the oases of the Atacama desert

and the Araucanian domain. Nevertheless, Spanish explorers found considerable lin-

guistic variety on their journey southward through northern Chile. They also report that,

as soon as the area of present-day Santiago in central Chile was reached, the natives all

spoke one language: Araucanian.

The Diaguita language did not cover all of what is now northwestern Argentina.

The inﬂuence of Atacame˜no extended onto the high plain (puna)ofwestern Jujuy and

Salta. The valley of Humahuaca in the centre of Jujuy province probably had its own

language. In the provinces of Tucum´an and Santiago del Estero the Diaguita shared the

178 3 The Inca Sphere

area with the Tonocot´e,who were under pressure from the nomadic Lule.Asitappears,

Lule was remotely related to the Vilela language of the Bermejo river basin further

east, now remembered by only a handful of speakers in the province of Chaco (Lozano

1977). The native population of Santiago del Estero was referred to as the Jur´ı,anethnic

group whose linguistic afﬁliation has not been determined. Probably, it was a cover

term for both the Lule and the Tonocot´e, as the distinction between these groups was

gradually lost in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The phonological substratum

that can be discerned in Santiague˜no Quechua may be attributed to the Diaguita (Nardi

1979), but it is also reminiscent of the Guaicuruan languages and Vilela for its uvular

obstruents.

A section about the distribution of the languages of the central Andes cannot be con-

cluded without mentioning the one language that is difﬁcult to locate on a conventional

language map. The Inca rulers and the members of their extended family are said to

have used a private or secret language (lengua particular)towhich the subjects of their

empire had no access. Its existence is mentioned by Garcilaso de la Vega (1609) and

Cobo (1653), among others. Cerr´on-Palomino (1998) analyses a number of lexical items

reported by Garcilaso to belong to this language. They are mainly personal names, titles

and place names, for which Garcilaso could ﬁnd no ready explanation within his native

Quechua. In one case Garcilaso de la Vega (Book 2, chapter 11) offers a translation when

he says that Cuzco (qusqu), the name of the Inca capital, meant ‘navel of the earth’ in the

secret Inca language (although this explanation is not generally accepted). In connec-

tion with most of Garcilaso’s examples Cerr´on-Palomino concludes that a Quechua or

Aymara etymology remains the most likely option. Cobo’s contribution to the problem

(Book 12, chapter 3) is signiﬁcant because he transmits the words of a direct descendant

of the Inca family, who reports that the secret language of the Inca was spoken by the

Indians of Pacaritambo, the mythical place of origin of the Inca clan west of Cuzco

(cf. Cerr´on-Palomino 1998: 417–18).

There have been many efforts to connect the language of the Incas with Quechua, or

with Aymara, or with Puquina, in spite of the fact that all three languages were widely

used in the empire, and none of them seemed ﬁt to act as a secret language. Of course,

the secret language may have been a divergent dialect of one of these languages. The

publication of a complete version of the chronicle of Juan de Betanzos (1551 [1987])

has provided new fuel to the discussion. It contains the text (with a translation) of an

Inca song commemorating a victory of the Incas over the Sora people in the southern

part of the present-day department of Ayacucho. This very short and cryptic text has

been interpreted as Puquina by Szemi´nski (1990), as Aymaran by Torero (1994a), and

as Aymaran with Puquina elements by Cerr´on-Palomino (1998). The latter author refers

to a statement by the chronicler Mur´ua (1613) that the secret language of the Incas was

neither Quechua nor Aymara.

3.2 The Quechuan language family 179

3.2 The Quechuan language family

In the late 1520s, when reconnoitring the coast of Ecuador and northern Peru, Francisco

Pizarro and his men set foot in the Inca city of T´umbez. The Spaniards, whom the

Indians called ‘Viracochas’ (wiraquˇca) after one of their principal gods, were pleased

to ﬁnd a relatively easy language that could serve as a means of communication almost

everywhere in the new land they had decided to penetrate. Betanzos, who was one of the

ﬁrst Spaniards to write about the events accompanying the destruction of the Inca dynasty,

reports that local natives, mostly Tall´an Indians, were trained in Spanish during those

ﬁrst years in order to serve as interpreters for the newly discovered language (Betanzos

1987: 269). Most notorious among them, a certain Felipillo, became instrumental in the

process and subsequent execution of the Inca Atahuallpa, reportedly because he had

taken an interest in one of the emperor’s wives and feared the consequences of that

relationship (Hemming 1973: 82, 558; Betanzos 1987: 284–5).

At ﬁrst, the language of the Inca administration was referred to as the ‘General

Language of the Inca’ (la lengua general del Inga). The Santo Tom´as grammar of 1560

(see section 3.2.4) is said to contain the ﬁrst mention of the name Quechua in print

(Cerr´on-Palomino 1987a: 32). There are no indications that the term was already in use

before the Spanish invasion, but neither is there any reason to assume that Santo Tom´as

would have been the inventor of it. Actually, he wrote Quichua,aspelling that may have

reﬂected the pronunciation used in the Lima region.

The name Quechua was possibly derived from a native term referring to the temperate

altitude zone roughly situated between 2,500 and 3,500 metres and to its inhabitants

(*qiˇc

wa, modern Cuzco Quechua q

iswa).

The initial consonant q of this word, a

uvular stop or fricative, triggers the lowering of the adjacent high vowel i to a mid [e].

Hence Quechua instead of Quichua.Atpresent, the name of the language is no longer

associated with the climatic term (if ever it was). In most Quechua dialects the language is

referred to as kiˇcwa,whereas Spanish speakers say either Quechua [k´eˇcuwa], in Peru and

Bolivia, or Quichua [k´ıˇcuwa], in Ecuador and Argentina. Another term for the Quechua

language which seems to have emerged during the colonial epoch is runa simi ‘language

of man/people’ (with as dialectal variants nuna ˇsimi in central Peru and runa ˇsimi in

Ecuador). Further discussion of the origin of the names for the Quechua language can

be found in Cerr´on-Palomino (1987a: 31–7) and in Mannheim (1991: 6–9).

Modern denominations meant to designate speciﬁc Quechua dialects are Huanca for

the dialects of the Huancayo–Jauja area in the department of Jun´ın in central Peru, Inga

There is an alternative explanation. The chronicler Cieza de Le´on (1553: Part I, chapter 90)

informs us about an ethnic group called the Quichua,who were established in the present-day

department of Apurimac. Garcilaso de la Vega (1609: Book III, chapters 11 and 12) refers to

them as Quechua and situates them in the northeastern part of Apurimac. Neighbours of the

Quichua/Quechua were the Aimara,who probably gave their name to the Aymara language.

180 3 The Inca Sphere

or Ingano for the dialect of Caquet´a and Nari˜no in Colombia, and Cuzco for the dialect

of Santiago del Estero in Argentina

.InEcuador we also ﬁnd inga ˇsimi ‘Inca language’

and yanga ˇsimi ‘useless language’. Most other dialects are referred to in the linguistic

literature by means of a geographic epithet, such as the name of a town, a province or a

country (Cuzco Quechua, Ancash Quechua, Bolivian Quechua, etc.). In the present-day

Andean society it is a common practice to refer to speakers of the different Quechua

dialects as if they were all speakers of the same language.

The picture of the complex Quechua dialect situation that emerged from system-

atic ﬁeld research conducted in the course of the twentieth century was primarily a

static one. The dialects were identiﬁed with agrarian regions, provinces or even single

communities. They were linked to a clear and speciﬁc geographic context. However

authentic such a geographic constellation may have seemed, it was itself the product

of poorly documented demographic developments, migrations, language shift, failed

attempts at linguistic uniﬁcation and centrifugal tendencies intended to reinforce local

identity. Little is known about the antiquity of the events that led to the existence of

the modern Quechua dialects. Reconstructed chronologies of phonological changes are

mostly relative, seldom absolute. Only a relatively well-documented dialect, such as

Cuzco Quechua, can be followed in its historical development over the last 450 years

(see Mannheim 1991).

3.2.1 The Quechua homeland

Foralong time linguists and historians were misled in their search for the original

homeland of Quechua. Until the 1960s, it was usual to associate the spread of the Quechua

language with the military expansion of the Incas. The Quechua homeland was thought

to have been situated in the immediate neighbourhood of the Inca capital Cuzco, a view

reﬂected in the work of Mason (1950), Rowe (1950b), McQuown (1955) and Loukotka

(1968). McQuown lists the names of scores of undocumented languages (mostly names

of towns or traditional administrative divisions) intended to ﬁll the alleged vacuum of

what was to become the Quechua linguistic domain. The language map accompanying

Loukotka’s classiﬁcation of the languages of South America (Loukotka 1968) shows

the Quechua homeland as a small patch of land extending westward from Cuzco. The

remainder of the Quechua-speaking areas, considered to be a linguistic terra incognita,

are indicated in white.

The above view was motivated, in particular, by statements of early colonial chroni-

clers emphasising the situation of prevailing multilingualism in the former Inca empire.

Garcilaso de la Vega (1609: Book 7, chapter 3) explicitly refers to Quechua as the

court language of Cuzco, which at the time of the Inca rulers was used as a general

The speakers of Santiago del Estero (Santiague˜no) Quechua are called cuzqueros.

3.2 The Quechuan language family 181

language ‘from Quito to the kingdoms of Chile and Tucum´an’. According to Garcilaso,

the Incas imposed it on their subjects, who originally spoke a multitude of languages

(‘each province has its own language different from the others’). The impressions of

the Spanish and indigenous chroniclers, who were witnesses of Inca society before it

became radically reorganised as a result of colonial rule, are not to be dismissed lightly.

The issue is how to interpret their statements. The alleged multilingualism can bear on

the coexistence of several languages, but also on the dialectal fragmentation within a

language. In the case of the former Inca empire it seems to point at the internal frag-

mentation of Quechuan and Aymaran, alongside the existence of several unrelated local

languages.

Even during the colonial period there was a certain awareness of the dialectal dif-

ferences within the Quechua linguistic domain. Some of it is already reﬂected in Santo

Tom ´as’s grammar and dictionary of 1560 (see section 3.2.4). In 1571 Pedro Pizarro

(1986: 75) wrote that the language spoken by the Xauxas and Guancas (the modern

Huanca dialects of Jauja and Huancayo) differed from standard general Quechua ‘as

does the language of the Portuguese from that of the Castilians’ (cf. Torero 1974: 144).

In 1700 Juan de Figueredo published a vocabulary of what he called the Chinchaisuyo

language, a sort of collective term for the Quechua dialects of central and northern

Peru. The name Chinchaisuyo referred to the northern administrative quarter of the Inca

empire.

The importance of the central and northern Peruvian Quechua dialects for the recon-

struction of the linguistic past of the central Andes became apparent after the publication

of an article by Ferrario (1956). Soon, the Quechua dialect situation became a major topic

of interest for linguists concerned with that language. Two pioneering studies (Parker

1963; Torero 1964) provided a classiﬁcation of the principal varieties of Quechua on

the basis of genetic principles. What emerged was a two-fold division of the Quechua

dialect complex, reﬂecting a case of genetic branching of much greater antiquity than

the Inca expansion. Central Peru, particularly the valleys carrying the headwaters of the

Andean rivers on the Paciﬁc side of the continental divide in the present-day department

of Lima, turned out to exhibit the greatest dialectal complexity. On this basis, Torero

(1970: 248) identiﬁed the coast and sierra of central Peru as the homeland of Proto-

Quechua. Initially, he dated the ﬁrst split and expansion of Quechuan some time before

AD 880 on lexico-statistic grounds. In Torero (1984: 382–3), however, he considered

an earlier period for the ﬁrst expansion of Quechuan, during the ﬁrst half of the ﬁrst

millennium, as more realistic.

The traditional indigenista ideology advocated by the Cuzco Language Academy

(Academia de la lengua quechua) considers the Cuzco variety of Quechua as the pure

and legitimate heir of the Inca language (quechua leg´ıtimo). In that perspective, the other

Quechua dialects are thought to be ‘degenerate’ or ‘mixed with Spanish’, a view that has

182 3 The Inca Sphere

its roots in the colonial period. Since Cuzco was the home of many descendants of the

Inca nobility, it acted as a stronghold of Inca tradition opposed to the growing cultural

inﬂuence emanating from Lima, the Ciudad de los Reyes ‘City of the Magi’, the seat

of the Spanish viceroy. Not surprisingly, Cuzco Quechua gradually became a symbol

of Andean identity, as the Quechua standard language or lengua general (see section

3.2.2) fell into disuse. The alleged superiority of Cuzco Quechua is one of the factors

that seriously hampered the identiﬁcation of the Quechua homeland.

Alternative hypotheses for an original Quechua homeland in the eastern forest areas

were proposed by Lathrap (1970: 176–9) and by Stark (1985a). Neither one of these

proposals has the potential of explaining the complex dialect situation that exists in the

Quechua-speaking regions of the Peruvian Andes. For a more detailed discussion see

Hartmann (1979: 287–9) and Cerr´on-Palomino (1987a: 336–41).

3.2.2 Historical overview of the colonial period

The language of the Inca administration at the arrival of the Spaniards was a variety

of Quechua. Little is known about the exact nature of the Inca language and its degree

of uniﬁcation. One of its characteristics appears to have been the voicing of stops after

nasals. This is attested by the shape of some of the earliest loan words which found their

way from Quechua into Spanish, e.g. c´ondor ‘condor’, tambo ‘halting-place’, ‘inn’,

Inga ‘Inca’ and huaranga ‘a thousand men (administrative unit)’. Voicing of this sort

is now mainly found in Colombia, in Ecuador and in the northern Peruvian Quechua

dialects of Cajamarca, Chachapoyas (Amazonas), Ferre˜nafe (Lambayeque) and Lamas

(San Mart´ın). Voicing of stops after nasals was also a feature of the Quechua spoken

in the sixteenth century on the central coast of Peru near Lima (cf. Cerr´on-Palomino

1990). The latter may have been fully or nearly identical to the Inca general language.

Shortly after the Spanish authority in Peru became ﬁrmly established, a debate arose

about whether the indigenous languages constituted acceptable tools for evangelisation.

Although the Indian population had diminished severely as a result of civil war and

epidemics, the Spaniards in Peru, still no more than a handful, were overwhelmingly

outnumbered. There was no question of using Spanish in contacts with the Indians, a

language which only very few of them could understand. Catholic priests and members

of religious congregations in the newly conquered territories, many of whom knew

Quechua well, spoke strongly in favour of using Quechua in the propagation of the

Catholic faith. Their pleadings convinced the Spanish king Philip II (cf. Rivarola 1990:

134).

An important landmark in the history of Quechua was the Third Lima Council (Te rcer

Concilio Limense)of1583, where it was decided to translate the religious texts referred

to as Doctrina christiana y catecismo para instrucci´on de los indios (‘Christian doctrine

and catechism for the instruction of the Indians’) into Quechua and Aymara (Ricardo

3.2 The Quechuan language family 183

1584). A committee in charge of the translation selected the Quechua orthography and

vocabulary to be used. It created a new standardised form of Quechua, in which certain

phonetic complications of the southern Peruvian dialects were disregarded in order to

gain a wider acceptance (Mannheim 1991: 142). As a result, the difference between the

velar and uvular stops was ignored, a procedure which is in line with the loss of that

distinction in the Ecuadorian branch of Quechua and in some of the northern Peruvian

dialects. The resulting standard language appears to have been in use well into the

seventeenth century (Itier 1991).

Gradually, however, the use of this Quechua lengua general as a countrywide vehicle

of communication became obsolete. Cuzco Quechua emerged as the most successful

local variety. It is exempliﬁed by a substantial dramatic literature (see section 3.2.11).

The Quechua renaissance was supported mainly by the descendants of the Inca nobility,

established in the Cuzco region, and by the local clergy. It received a fatal blow at the

end of the colonial period, in 1780–81, when Jos´e Gabriel Tupac Amaru, an alleged

descendant of the Inca dynasty, and other Indian leaders rose against the Spaniards. The

suppression of the rebellion and the execution of its leaders was followed by an active

policy directed against the position of Quechua and other Indian languages from the side

of the colonial rulers (Mannheim 1991: 74–6).

The abolition of Quechua ofﬁcial use at the end of the eighteenth century was the

result partly of efforts to suppress upcoming nationalist sentiments, and partly of the

centralist ideology favoured by the Bourbon administration in Madrid. Its representatives

were reluctant to maintain traditional privileges and customs. National independence of

the Andean republics soon followed, but it was brought about by a military campaign

headed by two non-Indian leaders, Sim´on Bol´ıvar and Jos´edeSan Mart´ın (although the

latter had partly Indian roots). The Indian population, having lost the initiative and its

leadership thirty years earlier, played practically no part in the independence movement

and showed itself unable to take advantage of it. Whatever protection the Indians and their

culture may have received from the Spanish colonial system, most of it was lost once the

Andean nations were independent. The role of Quechua as a means of communication

fell back to local purposes, its prestige lower than it had ever been before.

In their national aspirations, the independent Andean states followed the European

model. Spanish became the sole ofﬁcial language and a cornerstone of national identity

and cohesion. In many areas Quechua began to give way to Spanish. There was no room

any longer for either linguistic or cultural diversity. However, a reappraisal of native

values was to be achieved gradually during the twentieth century (see section 3.2.12).

3.2.3 Dialect situation

As a result of descriptive work carried out since the late 1960s, dialectal diversity

within the Quechua linguistic domain is particularly well documented. It is a ﬁeld of great