What is Quechua? – Iman Quechua? (quechua translation)

Quechua it’s the principal surviving indigenous language of the Andean Regions..

Quechua was the official language of the Inca Empire, who ruled much of the Andes region from the mid-1400s until the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in 1532. The Spanish banned the Quechua language and culture from politics and education. During the 1820’s, the Spanish colonies of South America rebelled against Spain and succeeded in establishing themselves as independent republics. Today Quechua remains a vital language with over 8 million speakers in several Andean republics. Quechua is the official language in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia together with Spanish. Nevertheless, census records and sociolinguistic studies document a continuous cross-generational shift from Quechua language to Spanish one in the latter half of the twentieth century, at both individual and community levels. In truth, however, there is no single Quechua language, instead there is what linguists called a dialect chain across most of Western South America, in which speakers of one Quechua language can understand the languages spoken by their immediate neighbours, but not a language further from them. There are as many as forty such Quechua languages spoken natively by a combined eight million Indian people in South America. The Quechua refer to themselves as Runa, ‘the people’. In Peru, a quarter of the population speaks Quechua, and about a third of the Quechua speakers speak no Spanish.