MundoAndino Home : Andes Bolivia Guide at Mundo Andino
Ayacucho Quechua
Ayacucho is one dialect of the Quechua language, spoken in the Ayacucho region of Peru, as well as by immigrants from Ayacucho in Lima. With roughly a million speakers, it is one of the largest dialects of the language along with Cusco Quechua. The literary standard of Southern Quechua is based on these two closely related Quechua varieties.
Sounds
Vowels
Ayacucho Quechua uses only three vowels: , , and , similar to Classical Arabic. Monolingual speakers pronounce these as , , and respectively, though the Spanish vowels , , and may also be used. When the vowels appear adjacent to the uvular fricative , they are rendered more like , , and respectively.
Consonants
The orthographic representations, if different, are shown in <angled brackets>.
Notable differences from Cusco Quechua:
There are no glottalized or ejective stops.
is a fricative in all positions.
Ayacucho Quechua lacks the characteristic fricativization of stops at the end of a syllable; compare Cusco nuqanchis with Ayacucho nuqanchik.
Ayacucho Quechua has borrowed hundreds of words from Spanish, and some speakers (even monolinguals) approximate the Spanish pronunciation; for them at least, are phonemes.
Morphology
See the main article on Quechua language for an overview of the morphology. The major differences in Ayacucho Quechua:
Pronouns
* The first person pronoun is nuqa, not Cusco Quechua nuqa. (Nuqa is sometimes found in Cusco as well.)
* The second person pronoun is qam, not Cusco qan; the plural is qamkuna.
* The first person plural inclusive pronoun is nuqanchik, not Cusco nuqanchis.
Verbal conjugation
* The first person plural exclusive suffix is -niku, not Cusco -yku; thus rimaniku "we speak".
* The first person plural inclusive and second person plural suffix is -chik, not Cusco -chis.
* The progressive tense infix is -chka-, not Cusco -sha; thus rimachkani "I am speaking".
* In the simple past, the third person singular suffix -n may be omitted: rimara "he/she spoke".
References
Rodolfo Cerron-Palomino, Linguistica Quechua, Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos 'Bartolome de las Casas', 2nd ed. 2003
Clodoaldo Soto Ruiz, Quechua: manual de ensenanza, Instituto de Estudios Peruanas, 2nd ed. 1993, ISBN 84-89303-24-X
Clodoaldo Soto Ruiz, Gramatica Quechua Ayacucho-Chanca, Ministerio de Educacion, 1976
Clodoaldo Soto Ruiz, Diccionario quechua Ayacucho-Chanca [- Castellano y vice versa]. Ministerio de educacion del Peru, 1976
Gary Parker, Ayacucho Grammar and Dictionary, Mouton, 1969
Need more information for your travel research or homework?
Ask your questions at the forum about Languages of Bolivia or help others to find answers.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Ayacucho Quechua
