Quechuan

Quechuan is the most widely spoken indigenous language family in the Americas, with something near eight million speakers in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and neighbouring countries. Whether it is one language or forty depends on the criterion used, since it forms a chain of varieties in which neighbours understand each other and the ends do not. Its history involves two separate imperial expansions.

The Inca state adopted a Quechuan variety as the language of administration and spread it deliberately across the territory it controlled, which was already an expansion beyond the family's homeland. Then the Spanish, arriving in the sixteenth century, kept it: colonial administrators and above all missionary orders used Quechua as a general language for governing and evangelising, produced grammars and catechisms in it, and thereby carried it into regions the Inca had never reached.

The homeland itself is not Cusco, despite the Inca association, but the central Peruvian coast and adjacent highlands, where the deepest internal divisions lie. Separating the language from the state that made it famous is the first thing to get right about it. Aymara, spoken alongside Quechua around Lake Titicaca, is a separate family and not a Quechuan language, though the two have been in contact so long and borrowed so heavily that a proposed Quechumaran grouping has been argued for and never established. The atlas keeps them apart, which is the majority position.

The religious vocabulary of the Andes is Quechua vocabulary, and much of what is known about pre-conquest Andean religion comes from documents written in Quechua or compiled by people working in it. A huaca is a sacred thing or place, which might be a mountain, a spring, a stone, a mummified ancestor or a shrine; an apu is a mountain lord; pachamama names the earth. These are not archaic terms. Offerings to apus and to pachamama continue across the Andes, alongside and inside Catholic practice, and the relationship between the two is a matter for the communities concerned rather than for an outside verdict about syncretism.

The written record has an uncomfortable shape. Much of it was produced during the extirpation of idolatry campaigns of the seventeenth century, in which ecclesiastical officials investigated and destroyed local shrines and recorded in detail what they were destroying. The Huarochiri Manuscript, the single most important source for Andean mythology, is a Quechua text compiled in that context. As with the Nahuatl material, the provenance does not make the content false and it does have to travel with it, because the questions asked shaped the answers written down.