Classical Quechua

Classical Quechua or lengua general del inga is either of two historical forms of Quechua, the exact relationship and degree of closeness between which is controversial, and which have sometimes been identified with each other. These are:

There are also some less common and typical uses of the term "classical" in reference to other Quechua varieties, whose relationship to the abovementioned ones is also controversial, namely:

For a long time, it was assumed that the variety of Quechua used as an administrative and court language by the Incas had been the one spoken in their capital Cuzco. The identification of Cuzco Quechua and especially some of its prestige sociolects as particularly refined and as a remnant of the Incas' language was commonplace in the late 16th and early 17th century. This identification was also traditionally maintained by the local elites and intellectuals in later centuries and continues to be advocated by the Cuzco Language Academy (Academia de la lengua quechua). Some modern scholars do believe that the Inca lingua franca was, indeed, a form of Southern Quechua (Quechua IIC), and thereby, in a way, a predecessor of the attested Cuzco dialect. They assume that it was like the modern Cuzco dialect and unlike the modern Ayacucho dialect in that it displayed numerous influences from the Aymara language, including aspirate and ejective consonants and numerous loanwords (possibly in turn because the Incas had spoken Aymara and/or Aymara-influenced Puquina before Quechua). This has also been used to explain why the highland Ecuadoran varieties in the north (Quechua IIB) have also acquired aspirates (albeit not necessarily in cognates of the Southern words with aspirates), presumably during the brief period of Inca rule there.

A more widespread view in the scholarly literature nowadays, however, is that the Inca lingua franca was actually based on a variety of Coastal Quechua spoken on the central-southern coast of Peru, which was rich, populous, had a strategic location and contained the important realms of Chincha and Pachacamac. The claim that this variety was chosen is mentioned explicitly in chronicles. Since that important area was depopulated after the conquest and came to be settled predominantly by Spaniards and Africans, leading to the extinction of Coastal Quechua, the dialect is not attested in later times.

It is sometimes thought that this dialect is identical to the one used in the earliest recorded Quechua grammar, vocabulary and texts by Dominican priest Domingo de Santo Tomás (1560). Alternatively, these works might partly reflect a different coastal dialect, that of Lima, or a mixture of the two, combined with elements from the nearby Central Quechua dialects. It does appear that Santo Tomás mixed words from several dialects, Southern and Central, in his works, while the morphology is predominantly Southern. It has also been claimed that some of the features of his variety are suggestive of affiliation with Quechua IIB (Northern Quechua).

It is thought, furthermore, that the Inca lingua franca is reflected in some of the Quechua words and phrases found in the early Spanish chronicles, especially the one of Juan de Betanzos from 1557, Summa y naración de los incas (in spite of its being recorded in Cuzco), in early borrowings into Spanish and glosses expressing concepts connected to the Incas (see below).

This Inca lingua franca is considered to have had the following characteristics, of which the first and partly the last one are found in Santo Tomás's variety:

A remarkable feature of Santo Tomás' orthography is the widespread use of the Spanish letters for open vowels e and o where such allophones are not to be expected in attested Quechua. It is not clear that this reflects some objective peculiarities of the variety. Further, in Santo Tomás' variety, the penultimate stress pattern that is nearly exceptionless in most other forms of Quechua is made significantly more complicated by various subrules taking into account morphological boundaries and syllable weight. The addition of enclitics, case suffixes and the 2nd person plural suffix -chik did not affect the stress of the word (e.g. máchu-lla 'only an old man', saynáta-kta 'mask (accusative)'), unlike the addition of the plural suffix -kúna; however, stress did end up on -chik if followed by another suffix (-chík-man), and the ablative ending -mánta received a separate primary stress; heavy antepenultimates attracted stress (e.g. túnquri 'Adam's apple'); the verbal inflection suffixes apparently tended not to affect the stress either, unless they contained a heavy syllable that ended up in non-final position, in which case the last such syllable was stressed (míku-ni 'I eat', mikú-ngi 'you (sg.) eat', miku-rqá-ngi 'you (sg.) ate').