Southern Quechua

Southern Quechua, or simply Quechua, 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 Guarani, it is the only indigenous language of the Americas with more than 5 million speakers. The term refers to the Quechuan varieties spoken in regions of the Andes south of a line roughly east-west between the cities of Huancayo and Huancavelica in central Peru, including the varieties spoken in Ayacucho, Cusco and Puno in Peru, in much of Bolivia and parts of north-west Argentina. The most widely spoken varieties are Cusco, Ayacucho, Puno (Collao), and South Bolivian.