Quechua is a diverse family of languages spoken by approximately ten million people throughout the greater Andean region from Argentina to Colombia. Southern Peruvian Quechua, spoken in and around Cuzco, is the most well-known Quechua language, and is currently the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas, with nearly 7 million speakers. Ancash Quechua—the focus of the Quechua program at Duke—is spoken my nearly 1 million speakers in the central region of Peru and corresponds to the language family’s place of origin (and to the site of the earliest cultivated beans and chiles in the Americas!). As such it is one of the richest Quechua languages in terms of diversity and grammar, embodying a vibrant and diverse cultural tradition that goes back many thousands of years to some of the earliest large-scale civilizations of the Americas such as Caral and Chavin.
Quechua students will have the opportunity to study language as a dynamic part of living and continually evolving cultures, and in relation to the dramatic and diverse landscapes of the Andean region. Courses focus on common conversational routines and skills as a means of introducing students to everyday life in the Andes. Students will concurrently study Andean cultural practices such as rituals, festivals, lifecycle events, food, music, art, architecture, farming, and herding. In this way, students will learn how the underlying concepts of Quechua grammar are grounded in different ways of thinking about taken-for-granted notions such as time, space, nature, and kinship.
Courses are taught in real-time online by linguistic anthropologist and Duke University instructor Joshua Shapero (joshuas.shapero@duke.edu).