Quechua or runasimi, which means language of the people, is the indigenous language of a large portion of the South American highlands, and there are about 10 million speakers today. However, we know of no electronic resources in Quechua, let alone any information and communication technologies in Quechua.The term Quechua covers a variety of distinct languages and dialects. The Ethnologue Data Base showes 46 dialects of Quechuan, 32 spoken in Peru. Quechua is also spoken in Bolivia, Ecuador, South of Colombia and North of Argentina. The most important dialect is that spoken in Cuzco, the seat of the former Inca Empire. Quechua spread by means of conquests realized before and during that empire. It displaced several earlier languages, only to find itself increasingly displaced today by Spanish. In spite of this intense competition, Quechua in its various forms remains a vital language in Peru and elsewhere.
A piece of good news for us, computational linguists, is that the endless battle to decide which one of the two competing orthographies should be the official one, the pentavocal and the trivocal, has finally ended in favor of the pentavocalic orthographic system, which has a closest correspondence with the Quechuan letter-to-sound rules.
In 2005 Spring Semester, I audited Quechua II at the University of Pittsburgh, taught by Salome Gutierrez. And during my time in Cusco (June-August 2005), I studied both the Quechua language and culture at Centro Bartolome de las Casas, where I enjoyed daily classes taught by native speaker and educator Gina Maldonado.
Written by 2Machupicchu
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