The Inga people are an indigenous ethnic group native to portions of

Colombia Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...

Ecuador Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, is a country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. It also includes the Galápagos Province which contain ...

, and

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 ...

with a claimed historical relation to the Incas. They speak a dialect of Quechua known as Inga Kichwa, which likely was introduced through both relations with the Incas as well as a

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

mission that was briefly established in the region. Quechua, being used as an administrative language in the

Andes Mountains The Andes ( ), Andes Mountains or Andean Mountain Range (; ) are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. The range is long and wide (widest between 18°S ...

since the Incan Empire and well into the Spanish

Viceroyalty of Peru The Viceroyalty of Peru (), officially known as the Kingdom of Peru (), was a Monarchy of Spain, Spanish imperial provincial administrative district, created in 1542, that originally contained modern-day Peru and most of the Spanish Empire in ...

, would have definitely been taught. It's believed that the language being shared via the mission led to it being commonly understood by almost all the locals, and later laid the groundwork for the Inga identity to form. Many today live traditionally in Sibundoy Valley, though are largely found across the borders of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Almost all Inga people are

bilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...

in Inga and Spanish, which has caused fear that the Inga language might be an

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead langua ...

. Francisco Tandioy Jansasoy is currently involved in the creation of an Inga–Spanish–English dictionary and accompanying pedagogic trilingual material for its use in universities and in the Inga-speaking communities of Colombia. There has been significant

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and

anthropological Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, wh ...

work done in the past 30 years pertaining to the Inga peoples.

References

Indigenous peoples of the Andes Indigenous peoples in Colombia {{SouthAm-ethno-group-stub