Quechuan is a family of closely related indigenous languages spoken across the Andean region of South America, including Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Chile. With a combined total of several million speakers, it is the most widely spoken indigenous language family of the Americas, and one of its varieties, Cusco Quechua, was an official language of the Inca Empire.
Facts
RegionOriginated in central Peru and spread across the Andes region of South America 1 Speaker Count2011 census figure, the more conservative of two figures the source gives; an earlier 2004 estimate placed speakers at 8 to 10 million. Proto-Language StatusQuechuan descends from a reconstructed common ancestral Proto-Quechua language; the family had already spread widely across the central Andes before the Inca Empire adopted it as an official language. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Quechuan Languages
Wikimedia FoundationLead section, first paragraphQuote, Lead section, first paragraph
just under 7 million from the most recent census data available up to 2011.
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