Who are the Quechua?
Eight to ten million people still speak the tongue of Tawantinsuyu — the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas.
Last updated: October 2026
The Quechua are the Indigenous peoples of the Andes whose language — Quechua, or Runasimi, “the people’s speech” — was the administrative tongue of the Inca Empire. Some 8 to 10 million people speak Quechua today across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Chile, making it the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas.
When people say Quechua, they usually mean two things at once: a family of peoples and a family of languages. The peoples are the Indigenous inhabitants of the Andes who speak Quechuan languages, together with many others who share Andean culture and history. The languages form the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas, used across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and parts of Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. The short answer gives the commonly cited figure of eight to ten million speakers, a broad estimate that reflects how hard it is to count speakers across six countries, in cities as well as mountain villages.
Quechua is not one uniform language. Linguists divide the Quechuan family into many regional varieties, sometimes grouped into two great branches, Quechua I in the central Peruvian highlands and Quechua II across the south and north. The Quechua of Cusco and the Quechua of Ayacucho, both in Peru, differ from each other; the Kichwa of Ecuador, which grew out of the language carried north by the Inca, differs again, and its speakers often call it Kichwa rather than Quechua. The varieties are related the way the Romance languages are related: close enough that their kinship is obvious, distant enough that mutual understanding is not guaranteed. For that reason, scholars usually speak of Quechuan languages in the plural.
The name Runasimi, often translated as the people's speech, comes from runa, meaning person or people, and simi, meaning speech or mouth. In the colonial period, Spanish writers called the language the lengua general, the general language, because it served as a lingua franca across much of the Andes. The term Quechua itself is believed to come from qhichwa, a word for the temperate valley zone of the Andes, the ecological belt where many Quechua-speaking communities live.
Quechua did not begin with the Inca. Versions of the language were already spoken in parts of the Peruvian highlands before the Inca Empire rose, and some scholars argue that the earlier Wari Empire, centered at Huari near modern Ayacucho, helped spread an early form of Quechua centuries before. What the Inca did was to take the variety spoken around Cusco and make it the administrative language of the largest empire ever built in the pre-Columbian Americas. Officials, soldiers, and traders carried it along the empire's road network, and resettled populations, known as mitmaqkuna, carried it still further.
The Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu, the Land of the Four Quarters, had no alphabetic writing system. Instead, the state kept records with quipu, knotted cords in which the position, color, and type of knot encoded numbers and, scholars believe, possibly more complex information. Quipu recorded census figures, harvests, tax obligations, and stores in state warehouses. The absence of writing makes the Inca achievement in administration all the more striking: a state of millions, spanning thousands of kilometers of mountain terrain, was governed through memory, messengers, cords, and a shared language.
The Inca state was built on Andean institutions that long predated it. The ayllu, an extended kin group that held land in common, organized labor and social life. Ayni, reciprocal help between households, and minka, communal labor for shared projects, structured work in villages. The mit'a, a rotating labor obligation owed to the state, built roads, terraces, and storehouses, and staffed the armies. The Inca did not invent these institutions, but they scaled them to an empire. After the conquest, the Spanish kept the mit'a for their own purposes, above all in the silver mines of Potosi, where it became a brutal forced-labor regime very different from its earlier form.
The Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire began at Cajamarca in 1532, when Francisco Pizarro's small force captured the emperor Atahualpa in the aftermath of a civil war between Atahualpa and his brother Huascar. Cusco fell the following year. But the conquest of the Andes was not a single event: resistance continued for decades, including the Neo-Inca state at Vilcabamba, which held out until 1572. Spanish rule brought epidemic disease, forced labor, and the reorganization of Indigenous life around colonial towns, mines, and haciendas.
Paradoxically, Spanish rule also spread Quechua. Colonial administrators and missionaries adopted it as the language of evangelization and local government, and the Third Council of Lima in the 1580s ordered the production of catechisms and grammars in Quechua. Missionary grammars and dictionaries standardized the language in print for the first time, and Quechua became the working language of a large colonial society. The chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Indigenous Andean writer, wrote his massive illustrated letter to the king of Spain in a mixture of Spanish and Quechua in the early seventeenth century, a work that remains one of the great firsthand accounts of the colonial Andes.
Quechua also became a language of rebellion. In 1780, the kuraka Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, who took the name Tupac Amaru II after an earlier Inca ruler, launched the largest Indigenous uprising in colonial South American history, demanding an end to colonial abuses. The rebellion spread across Peru and into Bolivia and Argentina before it was crushed in 1781; Tupac Amaru was executed in Cusco in a deliberately public and brutal fashion. The revolt frightened colonial authorities, and in its aftermath the use of Quechua in formal settings was discouraged. But the language continued to be spoken by millions, and it carried Andean memory through the independence wars and into the republican era.
Quechua is an official language in more than one country today. Peru's constitution recognizes Quechua alongside Spanish, and it has held official status there since the 1970s. Bolivia's 2009 constitution names Quechua and thirty-five other Indigenous languages as official languages of the state. In Ecuador, the constitution recognizes Kichwa as an official language of intercultural relations. Official status has not always translated into equal treatment: Quechua speakers have historically faced discrimination in schools, courts, and public life, and generations of children were punished or shamed for speaking their first language at school. Bilingual intercultural education programs, built up over recent decades, aim to reverse that history, with uneven results.
Quechua culture is visible far beyond the Andes. Andean music, built around panpipes, flutes, and charango, a small lute traditionally made from an armadillo shell, is heard across the world, and Andean textiles, woven in patterns that carry local meanings, are among the most admired crafts of the Americas. The potato, domesticated in the Andes thousands of years ago, and crops such as quinoa and maize remain staples of Andean farming, much of it still organized around terraces and communal labor. Festivals such as Inti Raymi, the winter-solstice festival of the sun, are celebrated in Cusco and elsewhere, drawing crowds of visitors as well as participants.
The language is also finding new life in media and technology. Peru's state broadcaster launched a television news program in Quechua, Nuqanchik, in 2016, the first of its kind on national television. Quechua-language radio stations serve communities across the Andes, and a Quechua-language edition of Wikipedia has been built by volunteers. Quechua hip-hop artists and filmmakers work in the language, and universities in Peru, Bolivia, and abroad teach it. The Quechua peoples, like the Maya, are not a relic of the past: they are millions of people whose language is spoken in mountain villages, in Andean cities, and in migrant communities around the world.
- Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, Lingüística quechua (Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas) — the standard linguistic survey of the Quechuan family.
- Gary Urton, Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources (University of Texas Press) — on quipu record-keeping.
- Terence D'Altroy, The Incas (Wiley-Blackwell) — the general history of the Inca Empire and its institutions.
- Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, First New Chronicle and Good Government (El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno) — the great Indigenous account of the colonial Andes.
- Charles Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Harvard University Press) — the 1780-81 uprising and its aftermath.
- Peru's Ministry of Culture and Bolivia's Ministry of Education, on official language status and intercultural bilingual education.
- UNESCO, on Indigenous languages and the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.