Quechua

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A group of Indigenous people mainly residing in the Andes region of South America
2. The language used by the Indigenous communities throughout the Andes mountains
3. An Indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the mountainous areas of the Andes in South America ; the native tongue used by this community known for its historical and cultural significance

Etymology: The name of the language family comes from a valley, not a people. In Quechua, "qhichwa" literally meant "temperate valley," a term for the warmer, fertile lands lying below the high Andean plateau. Speakers of the language used it for the valleys where they farmed, and the name grew to cover the language spoken there. The word reached English through Spanish. Spanish speakers, encountering the language during the colonization of the Andes, adopted the Quechua term as "quechua," and English borrowed that Spanish form. The result is that the English name for the language is a Spanish spelling of a Quechua place-word, carried across two languages before it became a label for an entire family of tongues spoken across the Andes.