Kichwa
Spoken in	Ecuador, Colombia, Peru
Native speakers	2,500,000  (date missing)
Language family	Quechuan Quechua II Northern Kichwa
Language codes
ISO 639-1	qu
ISO 639-2	que
ISO 639-3	Variously: inb – Inga inj – Jungle Inga qvo – Napo Lowland qup – Southern Pastaza qud – Calderón Highland qxr – Cañar Highland qug – Chimborazo Highland qvi – Imbabura Highland qvj – Loja Highland qvz – Northern Pastaza qxl – Salasaca Highland quw – Tena Lowland
Distribution of Quechua sub-groups. Kichwa is shown in blue.
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Kichwa (Kichwa shimi, Runashimi, also Spanish Quichua) is a Quechuan language, and includes all Quechua varieties of Ecuador and Colombia (Inga), as well as extensions into Peru, and is spoken by 2.5 million people. The most widely spoken dialects are Chimborazo and Imbabura Highland Kichwa, with one to two million and half a million to one million speakers, respectively. Cañar Highland Quecha has 100,000–200,000 speakers; the others in the range of ten to twenty thousand. Kichwa belongs to the Northern Quechua group of Quechua II (according to Alfredo Torero).

Kichwa syntax has undergone some grammatical simplification compared to Southern Quechua, perhaps due to partial creolization with the pre-Inca languages of Ecuador.

A standardized language with a unified orthography (Kichwa Unificado, Shukyachiska Kichwa) has been developed. It is similar to Chimborazo, less some of the phonological peculiarities of that dialect.

The earliest grammatical description of Kichwa was written in the 17th century by the Jesuit priest Hernando de Alcocer (Ciucci & Muysken 2011).

Particularities[link]

In contrast to other regional varieties of Quechua, Kichwa does not distinguish between original ("Proto Quechua") /k/ and /q/, which are both pronounced [k]. Therefore, [e] and [o], the allophones of the vowels /i/ and /u/ near /q/, do not exist, and kiru can mean both "tooth" (kiru in Southern Quechua) and "wood" (qiru [qero] in Southern Quechua), and killa can mean both "moon" (killa) and "lazy" (qilla [qeʎa]).

Additionally, Kichwa in both Ecuador and Colombia has lost possessive and bidirectional suffixes (i.e. verbal suffixes indicating both subject and object), as well as the distinction between the exclusive and inclusive first person plural.

Examples:

• Instead of yayayku / taytayku ("Our Father", the Lord's Prayer) Kichwa people say ñukanchik yaya / ñukanchik tayta.
• In Kichwa, you do not say suyayki ("I wait for you"), but kanta shuyani.

On the other hand, other particularities of Quechua have been preserved. As in all varieties of Quechua, the words for 'brother' and 'sister' differ depending on whom they refer to. There are four different words for siblings: ñaña (sister of a woman), turi (brother of a woman), pani (sister of a man), and wawki (brother of a man). A woman reading "Ñuka wawki Pedromi kan" would therefore read aloud Ñuka turi Pedromi kan.

Dialects[link]

The missionary organization FEDEPI (2006) lists eight dialects of Quechua in Ecuador, which they illustrate with the clause "the men will come in two days". (Ethnologue 16 (2009) lists nine, distinguishing Cañar from Loja Highland Quechua.) Below are the comparisons, along with Standard (Ecuadorian) Kichwa and Standard (Southern) Quechua:

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Ciucci, Luca & Pieter C. Muysken 2011. Hernando de Alcocer y la Breve declaración del Arte de la lengua del Ynga. El más antiguo manuscrito de quichua de Ecuador. Indiana 28: 359-393.

External links[link]

Kichwa language test of Kichwa at Wikimedia Incubator

• Imbabura Quechua Vocabulary List (from the World Loanword Database)
• Map of the regional varieties of Kichwa in Ecuador (quichua.net / FEDEPI.org)
• Otavalos Online: Basic Kichwa Course for Beginners, in Spanish (PDF)
• KU Kechwa Resource Center: Learning Salasaka Kechwa (by Nina Kinti-Moss)
• Pieter Muysken: Semantic transparency in Lowland Ecuadorian Quechua morphosyntax (PDF file)
• Openoffice v3.2+ Kichwa Spellchecker

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