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Language Lineage

Kichwa

Torero's Quechua II-B, the northern Quechua of Ecuador, Colombia and the Amazon, simplified in grammar and much shaped by Spanish contact.

c. 15th century CE – presentEcuador, southern Colombia (Inga) and the Peruvian Amazon (Chachapoyas, Lamas)
On this page
  1. Northern Quechua
  2. Sounds and a Unified Spelling
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points

01

Northern Quechua

Kichwa, the Ecuadorian form of the name, is spoken by several hundred thousand people in the Ecuadorian highlands and Amazon, and related varieties reach into Colombia (Inga) and the Peruvian lowlands. Its presence in Ecuador is usually traced to the Inca conquest in the late 15th century and to its spread as a colonial lengua general, though some scholars argue for earlier trade contacts. Compared with southern Quechua it has lost the possessive person suffixes on nouns and simplified its verb agreement.

In the town of Salcedo, Kichwa grammar combined with almost entirely Spanish vocabulary to create Media Lengua, one of the clearest examples of a mixed language anywhere.

02

Sounds and a Unified Spelling

Kichwa sounds noticeably different from the Quechua of Peru and Bolivia. It has no uvular q: the old sound merged with plain k, so the word for 'lake' is kucha where Cusco has qucha. It keeps the sound sh that Southern Quechua lost, as in shimi 'mouth, language'. In many highland dialects, such as that of Imbabura, stops become voiced after a nasal, so that suffixes beginning with k or t can be pronounced g or d. It also lacks the aspirated and ejective consonants of Cusco and Bolivia.

These differences, and the variety among Ecuadorian dialects, made written materials hard to share. From the 1980s Indigenous organisations and the national bilingual education system promoted a unified written standard, Kichwa Unificado, with a single spelling for all dialects. The name itself reflects that choice: the Spanish-based spelling Quichua gave way to Kichwa, with k and w. The standard is used in schools, official documents and media. Some speakers feel it favours no one's actual speech, and in practice local pronunciation varies widely beneath the shared spelling.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Ecuadorc. 590,000
  2. Colombiac. 10,000–20,000
  3. Perutens of thousands

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitlate 15th – 16th century CEContested

    North with the Inca

    Quechua spreads into Ecuador with Inca conquest and then with Spanish missionaries, replacing many local languages. How much of the spread is Inca and how much colonial, and whether Quechua arrived earlier through trade, is debated.

    Sources (1)
    • Adelaar, Willem F. H. with Pieter C. Muysken. 2004. The Languages of the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  2. Contactearly 20th century

    Media Lengua

    Kichwa speakers in the Salcedo area develop Media Lengua, a mixed language with Kichwa grammar and suffixes attached to nearly all Spanish word stems.

    Sources (1)
    • Muysken, Pieter. 1997. Media Lengua. In Contact Languages: A Wider Perspective, ed. Sarah G. Thomason. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  3. Revitalization2008

    Ecuador's constitution

    Ecuador's 2008 constitution makes Kichwa and Shuar official languages of intercultural relations, alongside Spanish, following decades of intercultural bilingual education.

    Sources (1)
    • Constitución de la República del Ecuador. 2008. Artículo 2.