With somewhere between seven and 10 million speakers across Latin America, Quechua is one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in the world. To understand the origins of the Quechua language, we have to go back in time to a territory currently in Peru and Ecuador know as Chinchay. The inhabitants of this area, the Chancas, were a coastal people heavily involved in trade whose economic interests allowed them to interact with other peoples in the north who also used their language, Quechua, as a means of communication to buy and sell products. The name Quechua, which some academics think means “temperate valley,” alludes to the ethnic group that lived in the high basin of the Río Pampas in Apurimac, considered to be the original speakers of this language and key to its spread. ## The History Of The Quechua Language The Incas, originally from Titicaca, moved to Cuzco speaking their own language, Pukina.…