Languages of the Middle Andes in areal-typological perspective: Emphasis on Quechuan and Aymaran

Abstract

Among the indigenous languages of the Andean region of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and northern Argentina, Quechuan and Aymaran have traditionally occupied a dominant position.Both Quechuan and Aymaran are language families of several million speakers each.Quechuan consists of a conglomerate of geographically defined varieties, traditionally referred to as Quechua "dialects", notwithstanding the fact that mutual intelligibility is often lacking.Present-day Aymaran consists of two distinct languages that are not normally referred to as "dialects".The absence of a demonstrable genetic relationship between the Quechuan and Aymaran language families, accompanied by a lack of recognizable external genetic connections, suggests a long period of independent development, which may hark back to a period of incipient subsistence agriculture roughly dated between 8000 and 5000 BP (Torero 2002: 123-124), long before the Andean civilization attained its highest stages of complexity.Quechuan and Aymaran feature a great amount of detailed structural, phonological and lexical similarities and thus exemplify one of the most intriguing and intense cases of language contact to be found in the entire world.Often treated as a product of long-term convergence, the similarities between the Quechuan and Aymaran families can best be understood as the result of an intense period of social and cultural intertwinement, which must have pre-dated the stage of the proto-languages and was in turn followed by a protracted process of incidental and locally confined diffusion.It stands to reason to assume that the initial interaction between the two language groups took place within a relatively limited geographical space, which may have been situated in the mountains and sections of the coast of Central Peru.It may have extended as far north as the department of Ancash, with its influential archaeological center at Chavin (1st millennium BC), and southward into the highlands of Ayacucho and along the Pacific coast, where the Pre-Columbian cultures of Paracas (± 600 BC-200 AD) and Nazca (± 200-700 AD) flourished.In this central Peruvian area, there are few traces of indigenous languages not belonging to the Quechuan and Aymaran families, in spite of recurrent reports of multilingualism in early colonial chronicles.Possibly, the impression of multilingualism among colonial observers is to be interpreted as a reflection of linguistic variation within the Quechuan and Aymaran families themselves, although this partly remains a matter of speculation.Other languages native to the Andean region were camp_010.pod576 07-10-12 14:21:11 -mu-mu 576 Willem F.H. Adelaar mainly found at the northern and southern peripheries of the Quechuan-Aymaran domain.Most of these groups have succumbed to the direct or indirect pressure of the two major indigenous language families or to Spanish, the language of the European colonizers who conquered the area in 1532.The Andean region as delineated at the beginning of this introduction represents an area with an originally high genetic diversity that achieved an apparent uniformity through the dominance of just a few of its endemic language groups (Quechuan and Aymaran) and an intrusive language (Spanish).The geographical area covered by this chapter on Andean languages is henceforth referred to as the Middle Andes.2It roughly coincides with the boundaries of the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu) in its final stage (± 1470-1532), and also with the maximal expansion of the Andean civilization.This civilization was based on an age-old cultural and economic interaction which had its roots in north-central Peru in the 3rd millennium before our era.3Areas further to the north and south, such as Ecuador, Colombia, central and southern Chile, as well as most of Argentina, did not play a significant part in these early developments.At the time of the Spanish conquest, however, the Andean and coastal regions of Ecuador, and northern Chile, as well as the Andes of Bolivia and northwestern Argentina were firmly integrated within a Middle-Andean area of socio-political and cultural interaction.To the east, most of the Middle Andes is confined by the Amazonian region, the eastern Bolivian lowlands and the Gran Chaco.From an ethnographic point of view, the boundaries with these areas are diffuse.It is therefore useful to include some discussion of the languages spoken in these transitional areas in an overview of Middle Andean languages.The purpose of the present chapter is to explore the typological profile of Quechuan and Aymaran, as well as the typological environment in which these language families have been situated over time, both from a historical and from a spatial perspective.In the absence of demonstrable genetic relationships, a comparison of the typological characteristics of the languages of the Middle Andes 07-10-12 14:21:11 -mu-mu 578 Willem F.H. Adelaar Potosi and Sucre that are now Quechua-speaking.The Aymaran family has alternatively been referred to as Jaqi (Hardman 1978(Hardman , 1985) ) and as Aru (Torero 1970(Torero , 2002)).5The internal diversification of the "Quechua" language group justifies its qualification as a language family within the same right as Aymaran.It comprises a large variety of dialects, spoken by a totality of some 8,000,000 speakers.On the basis of mutual intelligibility tests carried out in the 1970s, Torero (2002: 85) recognizes the existence of at least seven Quechua "languages", all of them dialectally diversified.However, there is a firmly established tradition of referring to all Quechuan varieties as "dialects", mostly identified by the name of the region or community where they are spoken (e.g.Cajamarca Quechua, Cuzco Quechua,

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