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Quechua
Last update: Saturday 11th of February 2012
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| Quechua Qhichwa Simi / Runa Shimi / Runa Simi | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | IPA: | |
| Spoken in: | Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. | |
| Region: | Andes | |
| Total speakers: | 10 million | |
| Ranking: | 65 | |
| Language family: | Quechuan | |
| Writing system: | Latin alphabet | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | Bolivia and Peru. | |
| Regulated by: | none | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | qu | |
| ISO 639-2: | que | |
| ISO 639-3: | que — Quechua (generic) many varieties of Quechua have their own codes. | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Quechua (Runa Simi; Kichwa in Ecuador) is a Native American language of South America. It was the language of the Inca Empire, and is today spoken in various dialects by some 10 million people (Quechuas) throughout South America, including Peru, South-western Bolivia, southern Colombia and Ecuador, north-western Argentina and northern Chile. It is the most widely spoken of all the languages of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Quechua is a very regular agglutinative language, with a normal sentence order of 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 16,575-foot volcano, whose name means "throat of fire" in the Quechua language, shot a 1.2-mile plume of ash into the sky on Feb. 12. Which coincidentally "throat of fire", great title for a porn movie.