Ayacucho Quechua

Vowels

Ayacucho Quechua has three vowels: /a/, /i/, and /u/, which are rendered by native speakers as [æ], [ɪ], and [ʊ] respectively. When these vowels appear adjacent to the uvular fricative /χ/, they are lowered (with [æ] instead being produced further back), yielding [ɑ], [ɛ], and [ɔ] respectively. In bilingual speakers, the Spanish realizations [a], [i], and [u] may also be found.

Consonants

The consonant phonemes of Ayacucho Quechua are outlined below. Orthographic symbols at odds with the IPA are given in angle brackets.

Notable differences from Cusco Quechua:

Ayacucho Quechua has borrowed hundreds of words from Spanish, and some speakers (even monolinguals) approximate the Spanish pronunciation. For such speakers, /f/ /v/ /b/ /d/ /ɡ/ /e/ /o/ are phonemes in borrowed words like libru (from Spanish libro "book") or servey (from Spanish servir "to serve")

Stress Rules and Syllable Structure

Quechua primary (strong) stress regularly falls the penultimate syllable (if a word has more than one syllable). It may also occur on the final syllable, in which case it is directly indicated by the acute diacritic. In slow speech, weak stress tends to fall on the first syllable of a word.

All phonemes appear in word initial position, though vowel clusters are not allowed, and word initial consonant clusters occur only in words borrowed from Spanish (these clusters are br-, bw-, by-, pl-, pr-, dy-, gr-, gw-, kr-, kl-, kw-, tr-, fr-, sp-, sk-, and sy-). The consonants h, ñ, t, ll, and r cannot occur in words final position (as well as Spanish borrowed consonants b, g, and f). This leads to a minimal possible syllable of V (only word initially) and a maximal native syllable of CVC ñan (with the prohibited consonants unable to appear in the final position), and a maximal possible syllable of CCVC kreyey (from Spanish creer "to believe").

Overview

Quechua is a largely agglutinative language and nouns can be modified by many affixes (mostly suffixes) which can mark the case of a noun or derive a new word. Some suffixes are possible in combination, such as -pa + -ta, ñuqapata, "to my place". Pronouns are marked with the same suffixes as regular nouns, as in -ñuqa "I", -ñuqa-pa "my".

Personal Pronouns

The first person plural pronouns Ayacucho Quechua are divided into inclusive and exclusive pairs. Ñuqanchik, the inclusive pronoun, means "we" and includes the person to whom the speaker is talking, as in "you and I". The exclusive pronoun, ñuqayku, also means "we", but does not include the listener, meaning approximately "we but not you".

Case Marking

Ayacucho Quechua substantives are marked for eleven grammatical cases, which are also conveyed through the use of suffixes. These suffixes may be placed onto nouns, numerals, pronouns, and with an adverbial meaning, on adjectives and adverbs.

Verbal Conjugations

In contrast to the fairly simple morphology for nouns, Quechua verbal morphology is much more complex. Verbs are conjugated for person and number of both the subject and the object. Subject suffixes precede explicit object suffixes as in riku-y-ki-ku "We see you", in which the first person -y appears before the second person -ki (ku, in this case pluralizes the first person). However, even the subject markers are preceded by the suffixes -wa and -su which indirectly convey the direct object of the verb, as in riku-wa-n-ki "You see me". Explicit personal markers are preceded by one of the tentatively titled "aspect" morphemes. The simple present tense is marked by the suffix -n-, apart from first-person subject and second-person object, where there is no suffix.

Below is shown the verb rikuy, "to see", fully conjugated in the simple present tense. The persons are shown accompanied by their coirresponding Quechua pronouns declined into the appropriate cases. Blocks which are left empty are either instances in which the object is the same as the subject, which requires the reflexive marker -ku-, as in riku-ku-y "I saw myself", or cases where such a statement is logically impossible, as in the intersection between a second person subject and a first person plural inclusive object, which would mean, approximately "You helped you and I".

Syntax

Ayacucho Quechua has a standard SOV word order, as in (pay) wasitam ruwachkan "he is building a house", but this can be inverted, since the syntactic relationship between nouns is made clear by the overt case markers. However, unlike in other casemarked languages (like Russian or Latin), the inversion of the standard word order in Ayacucho Quechua does not serve to topicalize the word (or phrase) in question since this too is explicitly marked by the -qa discourse topic marker. Primarily then, inversions of word order serve to emphasize words as particularly relevant or salient (particularly verbs). Compare standard wasita qawan "he watches the house" with qawan wasita "he watches the house" (as opposed to feeling it or hearing about it) in which the act of watching is being specifically highlighted.

With respect to smaller constituents, the order is much more fixed. Modifiers, such as adjectives, preadjectivals, adverbials and attributive nouns all occur before the head which they modify (including possessive nouns marked with -pa). Prepositions, when they occur, are also placed before their noun phrases.