Classical Quechua or may refer to two historical forms of Quechua, the exact relationship and degree of closeness between which is controversial, and which have sometimes been identified with each other.See Itier (2000: 47) for the distinction between the first and second enumerated senses, and the quote below for their partial identification.
These are:
the variety of Quechua that was used as a lingua franca and administrative language in the Inca Empire (1438–1533)Snow, Charles T., Louisa Rowell Stark. 1971. Ancash Quechua: A Pedagogical Grammar. P.V 'The Quechua language is generally associated with the "classical" Quechua of the Cuzco area, which was used as a lingua franca through Peru and Bolivia with the spread of the Inca Empire' (henceforward Inca Lingua FrancaFollowing the terminology of Durston 2007: 40; sometimes also referred to as Imperial Quechua). Since the Incas did not have writing (though some Quipus might have been narrative, following a logosyllabic pattern, according to some experts like Gary Urton and Sabine Hyland), the evidence about the characteristics of this variety is scant and they have been a subject of significant disagreements.Durston 2007: 40, 322 the variety of Quechua that was used in writing for religious and administrative purposes in the Andean territories of the Spanish Empire, mostly in the late 16th century and the first half of the 17th century and has sometimes been referred to, both historically and in academia, as lengua general 'common language'Beyersdorff, Margot, Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz. 1994. Andean Oral Traditions: Discourse and Literature. P.275. 'the primarily catechetical domain of this lingua franca – sometimes referred to as "classical" Quechua'...Bills, Garland D., Bernardo Valejo. 1969. P. XV. 'Immediately following the Spanish Conquest the Quechua language, especially the prestigious "classical" Quechua of the Cuzco area, was used as a lingua franca throughout the Andean region by both missionaries and administrators.'Cf. also Durston (2007: 17): 'The 1550–1650 period can be considered both formative and classical in relation to the late colonial and republican production'.See e.g. Taylor 1975: 7–8 for the dating and the name lengua general and Adelaar 2007: 183 for the dating (henceforward Standard Colonial QuechuaFollowing the terminology of Durston (2007: 40)). It is Standard Colonial Quechua in this second sense that is abundantly attested in writing, notably in the famous Huarochirí Manuscript, and that this article primarily describes.
There are also some less common and typical uses of the term "classical" in reference to other Quechua varieties, whose relationship to the abovementioned ones is also controversial, namely:
In reference to all use of Quechua as a literary medium until the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780–1782, after which literature in Quechua was banned,Mannheim 1991b: 74–75 although the language of most of the "Classical Quechua literature" written after the mid-17th century is more commonly seen as early Cuzco Quechua; As "Classic Inca", in reference to the reconstructed ancestor of all Southern Quechua varieties ("Common southern Peruvian Quechua").Rowe 1950, cited in Mannheim (1991b: 114). Note that this pre-supposes identity with the Inca lingua franca, whereas Rowe's sources are primarily from the 17th century, i.e. Standard Colonial Quechua
The Inca lingua franca
For a long time, it was assumed that the variety of Quechua used as an administrative and court language by the Incas had been the one spoken in their capital Cuzco. The identification of Cuzco Quechua and especially some of its prestige sociolects as particularly refined and as a remnant of the Incas' language was commonplace in the late 16th and early 17th century.Itier 2000: 51–55 This identification was also traditionally maintained by the local elites and intellectuals in later centuries and continues to be advocated by the Cuzco Language Academy ().Adelaar 2007: 181, Mannheim 2007: 116–117 Some modern scholars do believe that the Inca lingua franca was, indeed, a form of Southern Quechua (Quechua IIC), and thereby, in a way, a predecessor of the attested Cuzco dialect.Mannheim 1991b: 33 They assume that it was like the modern Cuzco dialect and unlike the modern Ayacucho dialect in that it displayed numerous influences from the Aymara language, including aspirate and ejective consonants and numerous loanwords (possibly in turn because the Incas had spoken Aymara and/or Aymara-influenced Puquina before Quechua).Durston 2007: 193–194Taylor 1975: 9–10, cf. Itier 2000: 52, 55 This has also been used to explain why the highland Ecuadoran varieties in the north (Quechua IIB) have also acquired aspirates (albeit not necessarily in cognates of the Southern words with aspirates), presumably during the brief period of Inca rule there.Adelaar 2007: 182Mannheim 1991: 178Adelaar 2007: 195
A more widespread view in the scholarly literature nowadays, however, is that the Inca lingua franca was actually based on a variety of Coastal Quechua spoken on the central-southern coast of Peru, which was rich, populous, had a strategic location and contained the important realms of Chincha and Pachacamac.Itier 2000: 47Durston 2007: 40 The claim that this variety was chosen is mentioned explicitly in chronicles.Durston 2007: 40 Since that important area was depopulated after the conquest and came to be settled predominantly by Spaniards and Africans, leading to the extinction of Coastal Quechua, the dialect is not attested in later times.Durston 2007: 48
It is sometimes thought that this dialect is identical to the one used in the earliest recorded Quechua grammar, vocabulary and texts by Dominican priest Domingo de Santo Tomás (1560). Alternatively, these works might partly reflect a different coastal dialect, that of Lima, or a mixture of the two, combined with elements from the nearby Central Quechua dialects.Durston 2007: 188–190Adelaar 2007: 191 It does appear that Santo Tomás mixed words from several dialects, Southern and Central, in his works, while the morphology is predominantly Southern.Mannheim 1991b: 140Durston 2007: 188 It has also been claimed that some of the features of his variety are suggestive of affiliation with Quechua IIB (Northern Quechua).Adelaar 2007: 187
It is thought, furthermore, that the Inca lingua franca is reflected in some of the Quechua words and phrases found in the early Spanish chronicles, especially the one of Juan de Betanzos from 1557, (in spite of its being recorded in CuzcoDurston 2007: 67, 191), and in early borrowings into Spanish, especially glosses expressing concepts connected to the Incas (see below).Durston 2007: 189, 343
This Inca lingua franca is considered to have had the following characteristics, of which the first and partly the last one are found in Santo Tomás's variety:Durston 2007: 189–190
the allophonic voicing of stops in front of nasals: > , > > Spanish cóndor, 'east' > Spanish > (a feature that was still attested in colonial times along the central coast near Lima, and is found to this day in northern Quechuan varieties); the tendency to drop word-final /q/ (e.g. the spelling Yaguar Guaca for the name of Yawar Waqaq); a word-initial change /r/ > /l/ (compare the name of Lima from lima-q < rima-q 'speaker, oracle') the use of the sound /ʃ/ that early Spanish sources rendered with the letter x (e.g. Quiquixana, Inca-related terms such as maxcapaycha for Mascapaicha and Xairi for Sairi (Túpac) in Oré's work, a few common words such as xuti for ŝuti in Santo Tomás) corresponding to the Colonial Classic Quechua ŝ, which was rendered with Spanish s.
A remarkable feature of Santo Tomás' orthography is the widespread use of the Spanish letters for open vowels e and o where such allophones are not to be expected in attested Quechua. It is not clear that this reflects some objective peculiarities of the variety.Durston 2007: 189 Further, in Santo Tomás' variety, the penultimate stress pattern that is nearly exceptionless in most other forms of Quechua is made significantly more complicated by various subrules taking into account morphological boundaries and syllable weight. The addition of enclitics, case suffixes and the 2nd person plural suffix -chik did not affect the stress of the word (e.g. máchu-lla 'only an old man', saynáta-kta 'mask (accusative)'), unlike the addition of the plural suffix -kúna; however, stress did end up on -chik if followed by another suffix (-chík-man), and the ablative ending -mánta received a separate primary stress; heavy antepenultimates attracted stress (e.g. túnquri 'Adam's apple'); the verbal inflection suffixes apparently tended not to affect the stress either, unless they contained a heavy syllable that ended up in non-final position, in which case the last such syllable was stressed (míku-ni 'I eat', mikú-ngi 'you (sg.) eat', miku-rqá-ngi 'you (sg.) ate').Santo Tomás 1560: 80–85
There is some evidence that the Spanish, too, did initially use the Inca lingua franca or a related form of Coastal Quechua for religious and administrative purposes from the beginning of the conquest of Peru in 1532 until some point in the 1560s (for instance, using a pronunciation landi- instead of ranti- for 'to buy'). This changed as the variety went extinct.Durston 2007: 190–191 Ironically, many of its features came to be explicitly disparaged as vulgarisms in the linguistic appendix to the influential Quechua publications of the Third council of Lima in the 1580s.Durston 2007: 192
Standard Colonial Quechua
Origin
A standardised form of Quechua was codified in the religious texts produced by the Third Council of Lima (1582–1583) and published in 1584–1585, as well as in the associated anonymous grammar and dictionary published in 1586. More or less close written approximations of this variety were used for religious and administrative purposes during the rest of the 16th and at least the first half of the 17th century,Taylor 1976: 7–8Itier 2000: passim although modifications of some details were by no means uncommon.Durston 2007: 197–206 The exact nature and origins of this variety and its relationship to the Inca lingua franca and to different Quechua regional dialects are somewhat controversial.
There is no doubt that Standard Colonial Quechua was a form of Quechua IIC, or Southern QuechuaSaenz 1991: 256Mannheim 1991: 142 (although a minority view is that specifically the Manuscript of Huarochirí has features of Quechua IIB instead.). For instance, it has the 1st person subject suffix -ni rather than -y and the 1st person object -wa- rather than -ma-. It also expresses verbal number by means of the suffixes -ku and -chik. Accordingly, it can be seen as some sort of natural continuation of the Inca lingua franca, still essentially the same "Southern Peruvian Quechua", if the Inca koiné is assumed to have been a Cuzco dialect of type IIC,Mannheim 2001b: 33–35 or it can be regarded as a distinct rupture according to the currently more common view that the Incas had used a different, Coastal Quechua variety.Itier 2000: 46–48
In spite of the clear Southern dialectal basis, the codifiers of Standard Colonial Quechua claimed, and do appear, to have made an effort to select forms ensuring maximal intelligibility across the country, avoiding both elements that were unique to various deviant local dialects and those that were peculiar to what was considered prestigious aristocratic speech in Cuzco.Taylor 1976: 9–10 Thus, they preferred the widespread word muchu- rather than the Cuzco-specific synonym allpari- for 'suffer', and aklla- instead of chikllu- for 'choose'. They also avoided Cuzco borrowings from Aymara or Puquina which may have been partly due to the Incas' own origins.