Quechuan

Quechuan, called runa simi or people's language, is a family from central Peru which spread across much of the central Andes long before the Incas, possibly through the expansion of Wari. In 1337 regional varieties were spoken by peoples such as the Wanka and Chanka, while the Incas of Cuzco were still a small chiefdom.

From the 1430s the conquests of Pachacuti and his successors made Quechua the official lingua franca of an empire from Ecuador to central Chile. After the Spanish invasion of the 1530s it remained the common tongue of the Andes: friars used it for evangelization, and Domingo de Santo Tomás printed the first Quechua grammar in 1560.

After the Túpac Amaru II rebellion of 1780, the colonial government banned public use of the language and proscribed Quechua books, and its standing collapsed; the independence era of the early nineteenth century brought a short-lived revival.