Quechumaran or Kechumaran is a language-family proposal that unites

Quechua Quechua may refer to: *Quechua people, several indigenous ethnic groups in South America, especially in Peru *Quechuan languages, a Native South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes, derived from a common ancestral language **So ...

and Aymara. Quechuan languages, especially those of the south, share a large amount of vocabulary with Aymara.

Terrence Kaufman Terrence Kaufman (1937 – March 3, 2022) was an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He was an emeritus professor of linguisti ...

finds the proposal reasonably convincing, but

Willem Adelaar Willem F. H. Adelaar (born 1948 at The Hague) is a Dutch linguist specializing in Native American languages, specially those of the Andes. He is Professor of indigenous American Linguistics and Cultures at Leiden University. He has written broadl ...

, a

specialist, believes the similarities to be caused by borrowing during long-term contact.

Lyle Campbell Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeri ...

suspects that the proposal is valid but does not consider it to have been conclusively proved. Moulian ''et al.'' (2015) posits the

Puquina language Puquina (or Pukina) is a small, putative language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, which consists of the extinct Puquina language and Kallawaya, although it is assumed that the latter is just a remnant of the former mixed with Que ...

of the Tiwanaku Empire as a possible source for some of the shared vocabulary between Quechua, Aymara and

Mapuche The Mapuche ( (Mapuche & Spanish: )) are a group of indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of Patagonia. The collective term refers to a wide-ranging ethnicity composed of various groups who s ...

. An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. also groups Quechuan and Aymaran together. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.

Swadesh lists

100-word

Swadesh list The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatednes ...

s of Proto-Aymaran and Proto-Quechuan from Cerrón (2000): Cerrón Palomino, Rodolfo. 2000. El Aimara y el Quechua: relaciones distantes. In Luis Miranda Esquerre (ed.), ''Actas del I Congreso de Lenguas Indígenas de Sudamérica'', 17-38. Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, Facultad de Lenguas Modernas, Departamento Académico de Humanidades. :

References

{{Authority control Proposed language families

Swadesh lists

Further reading

References