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, an Indigenous South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes, derived from a common ancestral language ...

and

Aymara Aymara may refer to: Languages and people * Aymaran languages, the second most widespread Andean language ** Aymara language, the main language within that family ** Central Aymara, the other surviving branch of the Aymara(n) family, which today ...

. Quechuan languages, especially those of the south, share a large amount of vocabulary with Aymara. The hypothesis of the existence of Quechuamara was originally posted by linguist Norman McQuown in 1955.

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 linguistic ...

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 a Professor of Indigenous American Linguistics and Cultures at Leiden University. He has written bro ...

, 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 an extinct language once spoken by a native ethnic group in the region surrounding Lake Titicaca (Peru and Bolivia) and in the north of Chile. It is often associated with the culture that built Tiwanaku. Remnants of Puqui ...

of the

Tiwanaku Empire The Tiwanaku polity ( or ) was a Pre-Columbian polity in western Bolivia based in the southern Lake Titicaca Basin. Tiwanaku was one of the most significant Andean civilizations. Its influence extended into present-day Peru and Chile and lasted f ...

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

Mapuche The Mapuche ( , ) also known as Araucanians are a group of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of Patagonia. The collective term refers to a wide-ranging e ...

. An automated computational analysis (

ASJP The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists f ...

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 A Swadesh list () is a compilation of cultural universal, tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. That is, a Swadesh list is a list of forms and concepts which all languages, without exception, have terms for, such as ...

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