Cuzco Quechua () is a dialect of

Southern Quechua Southern Quechua (, ), or simply Quechua (Qichwa or Qhichwa), is the most widely spoken of the major regional groupings of mutually intelligible dialects within the Quechua language family, with about 6.9 million speakers. Besides Guaraní it ...

spoken in

Cuzco Cusco or Cuzco (; or , ) is a city in southeastern Peru, near the Sacred Valley of the Andes mountain range and the Huatanay river. It is the capital of the eponymous province and department. The city was the capital of the Inca Empire unti ...

and the Cuzco Region of

Peru Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...

. It is the Quechua variety used by the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in Cuzco, which also prefers the Spanish-based five-vowel alphabet. On the other hand, the official

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

used by the ministry of education has only three vowels.

Phonology

There is debate about whether Cuzco Quechua has five or three vowel phonemes: . While historically Proto-Quechua clearly had just three vowel phonemes /*a, *ɪ, *ʊ/, and although some other Quechua varieties have an increased number of vowels as a result of phonological

vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...

emergence or of

monophthongization Monophthongization is a sound change by which a diphthong becomes a monophthong, a type of vowel shift. It is also known as ungliding, as diphthongs are also known as gliding vowels. In languages that have undergone monophthongization, digrap ...

, the current debate about the Cuzco variety seems to be not phonological in matter but just orthographic.Adelaar, Willem F. H. (2014)
The Andean three-vowel system and its effect on the development of a modern orthography for the Aimaran and Quechuan languages
''Scripta, 6'', 33–46. Available at .

Grammar

Pronouns

Nouns

Adjectives

Verbs

References

External links

Simi Taqe Qheswa - Español - Qheswa (Qheswa simi hamut'ana kuraq suntur), Qosqo, Peru, 2006
(pdf 3,8 MB). Dictionary of the AMLQ: Cusco-Quechua - Spanish, Spanish - Cusco-Quechua.
Collections in the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Languages of Peru Southern Quechua {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub