Quechua is a Native American language family spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably some 6 to 8 million speakers (estimates vary widely). Some speakers of Quechua also call it 'runa simi' (or regional variants thereof), literally 'people speech', although 'runa'...
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Quechua is a Native American language family spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably some 6 to 8 million speakers (estimates vary widely). Some speakers of Quechua also call it 'runa simi' (or regional variants thereof), literally 'people speech', although 'runa' here has the more specific sense of indigenous Andean people.
There are few sharp boundaries between what might be identified as specific 'languages' within the Quechua family, which consists of large zones of dialect continua, although three major regions can be distinguished:
Speakers from different points within any one of these major regions can generally understand each other reasonably well, though there are nonetheless significant local-level differences across each. (Huancayo Quechua, in particular, has several very distinctive...
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