Quechua alphabet facts for kids

The Quechua alphabet (called Achahala in Quechua) is a way of writing the Quechuan languages. It uses letters from the Latin alphabet, just like English and Spanish. Since May 1975, the Quechua alphabet has been officially used in Peru. This happened when Quechua became an official language alongside Spanish.

How the Quechua Alphabet Developed

Before the Spanish arrived, people in the Andes mountains did not have a writing system for Quechua. So, when the Spanish came, they started writing Quechua using their own Latin alphabet. They tried to make the Spanish way of writing fit the sounds of Quechua.

For example, Spanish uses five vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u). These were used for Quechua, even though Quechua has different vowel sounds. Some sounds, like the "w" sound, were written in many different ways.

Important steps in how Quechua was written include:

• The Third Lima Ecclesiastical Council's rules for writing.
• The rules made by Diego Gonzalez Holguin. He used double letters, like pp or tt, to show special sounds called aspirated or ejective sounds. These are sounds made with a puff of air or a quick burst.

Later, new ways of writing appeared. Some were based on updated Spanish rules. Others were new ideas. For example, some people started using the letter j for certain sounds. In the late 1800s, a European named Ernst Middendorf began using the letter k for some Quechua sounds. This idea became quite popular.

In the early 1900s, people started making complete new alphabets for Quechua. Two important ideas came from the city of Cuzco:

• The 'La Paz alphabet' was suggested in 1950. It was later approved at a big meeting in La Paz. This alphabet was the most common way to write Quechua until 1975.
• Another alphabet was proposed by a poet named Andrés Alencaste. His alphabet was very similar to the one used today. He was the first to suggest using just one letter for each vowel sound in Quechua.

The Official Quechua Alphabet Today

The number of letters used to write Quechua can change a bit depending on the specific Quechua dialect. But here are the main letters that are generally used for native Quechua words:

In Ecuador and Bolivia, the letter J (j) is used instead of H (h). This is because special marks are added to H and J to show aspirated (with a puff of air) and ejective (with a burst of air) sounds.

Some Quechua dialects use five vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u) instead of three. This helps to show different vowel sounds. Also, to show that a vowel sound is long, people sometimes double the vowel letter, like aa or ii.

A few other dialects have even more sounds. For these, extra letters are used:

Writing Borrowed Words

Quechua also uses extra letters to write words that come from other languages. Most of these are loanwords from Spanish. When people speak carefully, these letters might sound like their Spanish versions. But usually, the Spanish sound is changed to a native Quechua sound.

For Special Sound Notes

When linguists (people who study language) write down sounds very precisely, they use four more letters for Quechua:

See also

• Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua