Abstract This chapter reviews the wide range of hypotheses on the origins and dispersal phases of the two main expansive language lineages of the Central Andes, Quechuan and Aymaran. To judge fully which hypotheses are most plausible, they are assessed not in linguistic terms alone, but alongside all else that is known of the Andean past, particularly from the historical and archeological records. They are also set against how the particularities of the Andean context, environmental and cultural, may have shaped how languages spread here. The flip-side of the major language dispersals, meanwhile, is that many other indigenous language lineages went extinct, as their speaker populations progressively shifted language to Quechuan or Aymaran varieties. The review of the history of the field culminates with the state of the art on Quechuan and Aymaran expansions, including new proposals that could revolutionize long-established thinking on Andean linguistic prehistory, and indeed on the traditional Quechuan “family tree.”
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