© 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article (chapter 52)…

Heggarty, P., & Beresford-Jones, D. 2013. Andes: linguistic history.

In I. Ness & P. Bellwood (eds) The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, 401–09. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

… which has been published in final form in The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, edited by Immanuel
Ness. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The final published version is available for download from the publisher’s website at:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm852

[Pagination adjusted so that page numbers *do* correspond to final article and can be cited accurately.]

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 THE WILEY-BLACKWELL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL HUMAN MIGRATION

CHAPTER 52, PP. 401–09

ANDES: LINGUISTIC HISTORY

Paul Heggarty and David Beresford-Jones

Dept. of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig

This chapter focuses on the two major indigenous language families of the central Andes: Quechua and
Aymara. The (pre)histories of their origins, expansions, divergence, and convergence are compared with the
Andean archaeological record, considered in further detail also in the next chapter.

1. OVERVIEW: INFERRING MIGRATIONS FROM LANGUAGE IN THE ANDES

The indigenous languages of the Andes offer unique insights into migrations long before recorded history here. The
Quechua family, for instance — by number of speakers our greatest surviving link to the speech of the New World
before European conquest — includes such far-flung outposts as to attest unfailingly to great migrations of some
form (Fig. 1). The exact story that language data tell here, however, turns out to challenge many a long-held
assumption about population migrations in Andean prehistory.

Certainly, language spreads may reflect physical migrations of populations, but they by no means necessarily always
do (Bellwood this volume). Major language dispersals are typically a mix of prototypical migrations of speakers, and
of other populations staying put but switching to a different language — one associated with some prestigious
cultural complex that is doing the expanding, rather than an actual population. Pending detailed comparison of the
linguistic and genetic ancestries of populations in the Andes, only just beginning, here we focus on other
characteristics of language proper that might also help tease these conflicting scenarios apart.

In the Americas, language decline and extinction themselves have largely tracked the progression of the net
demographic impact of incoming migrants from Europe on given regions. Native languages have survived well only
in two types of context. One is where European immigration remained thin or nil until relatively recently, as in
remote parts of the (Sub-)Arctic, Amazonia, or the Chaco. The other is where native populations were and
remained dense enough not to be swamped by incoming ones: …

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Figure 1. Present-day distribution of the Quechua and Aymara language families

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… in the heartlands of pre-Columbian civilisation that were Meso-America and the Central Andes.

2. THE CENTRAL CORE

2.1 INCAS — OR SPANIARDS?

The clearest signs of past migrations are language enclaves that stand isolated at great distances from their nearest
linguistic relatives. In good part responsible for these, though in ways less straightforward than is often assumed,
was the final and most widespread of all incarnations of Andean civilisation, short-lived though it was:
Tawantinsuyu, alias the Inca Empire.

Beyond its original ‘Continuous Zone’ (Fig. 1), Quechua leapfrogged other native languages far to both north and
south; at least some population of Quechua-speakers must have travelled to each region. Tellingly, the Quechua
spoken in southern Bolivia derives fairly straightforwardly from that spoken around Cuzco in Inca or early colonial
times. The Incas certainly fortified lower-lying regions like Cochabamba; garrisons such as those at Inkallaqta likely
brought in significant early contingents of Quechua speakers. The pocket even further south, around Santiago del
Estero in north-west Argentina, is also derived essentially from Cuzco. Certain traits, however, hark back to the
Quechua of central Peru instead, suggesting an incoming population drawn in part from there too — perhaps
expeditionary troops either recruited by the Incas, or accompanying early Spanish forays here (see Adelaar 1995,
DeMarrais forthcoming).

Indeed it is by no means certain that the Incas played the primary role in these southernmost migrations. It is no
accident that within Quechua’s Bolivian heartland lies Potosí, to whose silver mines the early Spanish colonial
regime drafted tens of thousands of Indian labourers over many decades. Drawn from the entire archbishopric of
Cuzco, most of it far to the north, it is their forced migrations that offer the most convincing explanation for how a
Cuzco-like form of Quechua could have established itself so firmly here. Different linguistic impacts attest to the
demographic significance of a similar migration draft for the Huancavelica mine in central highland Peru, essential to
supplying Potosí with mercury (Heggarty & Pearce forthcoming b).

The Spaniards here were in fact co-opting an existing Inca institution: the mit’a, a ‘turn’ of duty, i.e. a rotating
draft, whether for military service or as labour for public works. A second, separate Inca policy resulted even more
directly in forced migrations, of so-called mitma populations — literally ‘outsider’ or ‘newcomer’ groups, or in
modern terms effectively ‘(im)migrant’ populations.

The particular circumstances of the latter years of Inca rule may well have entailed effective ‘migrations’ of one sort
or another, especially to Ecuador, significant enough to account for Quechua’s otherwise puzzlingly strong presence
there. Tawantinsuyu had become increasingly articulated around not only Cuzco but also a new secondary capital
and court in Quito, whose attendant institutions presumably entailed significant movement of people there from
elsewhere in the Andes. In 1532 the Empire was only just emerging from a civil war and succession struggle
between the two centres, …

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… when the Spaniards captured, and within the year executed, the last Inca emperor, Atawallpa. So abrupt and
bewildering was Tawantinsuyu’s downfall that it perhaps froze in place further, unplanned ‘migrations’: hosts of
troops, and others in the Empire’s service, left stranded perhaps thousands of kilometres from home.

Certainly, somehow Quechua became heavily implanted in Ecuador. Crucially, though, unlike the Quechua of Bolivia
or Argentina, that of Ecuador certainly cannot be derived from Cuzco speech. Rather, it is closest to the Quechua
once spoken in central coastal Peru, hence a long-standing alternative hypothesis that looks instead to the regional
trading power of Chincha here, in the centuries before the Incas. Relying heavily on an interpretation of Chincha
commerce as sea-borne, Torero (1984) proposed that its form of Quechua thus ‘migrated’ as a language of trade,
northwards along the Peruvian coast and then somehow high into the Ecuadoran Andes. Hocquenghem
(forthcoming), however, dismisses any such trade, given extremely adverse prevailing winds and currents. Overall,
the single most coherent scenario seems one of mitma migration(s) directly into the Ecuadoran highlands during Inca
times, though of populations drawn predominantly not from Cuzco but from the Chincha region.

Quite how substantial such migration(s) may have been remains unclear. For Ecuador Quechua also bears telltale
traces of language shift, typical of a lingua franca learnt by various existing populations, each originally speaking a
different native tongue, in order to facilitate communication amongst themselves (see Cerrón-Palomino 2003: –
). Strong ethnic identities and tribal names duly carry on even among Ecuadoran highland populations who
today all speak Quechua. Their original linguistic diversity (Adelaar with Muysken 2004: ), once unified under
Inca control, makes for a scenario of precisely the type in which significant shift towards an immigrant language can
occur, even when its speakers are relatively few in number; for a similar ‘primus inter pares’ language spread
elsewhere, see Heggarty & Renfrew (forthcoming b a: § ). And here too Quechua seems to have continued
consolidating even under the Spaniards, thanks to their preference for it as a single common language of
communication with the Indian population (not least for evangelisation). Finally, especially in Ecuador but
sporadically as far as Bolivia, highlanders migrating down the eastern slopes of the Andes have spread their Quechua
and Aymara into the Amazon lowlands, mostly in historical times.

Elsewhere, other isolated pockets of Quechua are often enthusiastically taken as traces of mitma migrations. The
claims are most plausible in regions where the language does not otherwise seem ever to have been widely
established, not least the Quechua enclaves of Chachapoyas, Cajamarca and Inkawasi in northern Peru
(Heggarty 2007: ‐ ).

2.2 BEFORE THE INCAS

Language migrations in the Andes are far from an Inca story alone, however. Their rule came much too late to
have been the major player in the initial rise of the Quechua or Aymara language families; the core diversity within
each dates back a millennium or more before them (Heggarty 2007: ‐ ). Peeling back the Inca era expansions
leaves Quechua occupying only its Continuous Zone (and not yet quite so far south as Titicaca), plus perhaps the
isolated outposts in far northern Peru. This is still a …

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… thousand kilometres of tortured mountain topography, however, over which the language had somehow dispersed
in relatively short order.

We can also make out a second, underlying layer across much of the same territory: Aymara, as attested by
widespread placenames, enclaves surviving into early Spanish colonial times, and the little known ‘Central Aymara’
(alias Jaqaru/Kawki) spoken to this day in the highlands immediately south-east of Lima (Fig. 1, Beresford-Jones &
Heggarty forthcoming a: Figs 4 and 5). The Quechua of Cuzco itself is laced with Aymara ‘substrate’ traces. So
despite present-day popular associations, the early distributions of both families in fact point to homelands far to the
north-west of Lake Titicaca or even Cuzco; as does the intense convergence (but not common origin!) between
them since the earliest stages of their expansion histories.

We thus have two major language dispersals to explain in ‘real-world’ terms; and on a logic of commensurate scale,
by the most significant expansive processes observable in archaeology too, viz. the Andean ‘Horizon’ phenomena.
The Incas constituted the ‘Late Horizon’, whose own significant linguistic impacts we have just seen. Over the
preceding one to two millennia, the plausible time-span for the initial spreads of Quechua and Aymara, and over the
same territorial extents, two previous horizons are visible. Our own hypothesis is straightforward: Quechua spread
with the Middle Horizon, centred on Wari in the south-central highlands of Peru; in doing so it eclipsed the Aymara
left by the Early Horizon, focused on Chavín further to the north (Fig. 1). This overturns traditional thinking, and is
now one of various hypothesised permutations of which polities spoke and spread which language lineage(s): for a
summary and assessments see Heggarty & Beresford-Jones (forthcoming a). Much remains in flux, though all do
agree that Wari is inescapably a prime candidate for propelling major language expansion in the Andes — whether
of Quechua, Aymara, or both. The close matches between the linguistic and archaeological records, on the levels of
chronology and especially geographical distribution, dictate nothing less.

But does any of this prove migrations? Most relevant to this is a third level, of causation: i.e., which real-world
expansive processes can account for why particular languages undergo spectacular spreads at given times? On first
principles and known historical precedents (Heggarty & Renfrew forthcoming a: § . .), the scale and completeness of
the main Andean language dispersals incline towards a stronger rather than weaker view of what the Wari and
Chavín phenomena really were. And they suggest that either powerful and rapid demic diffusion, or significant full-
blown migration (forced or otherwise), was a key feature of Andean prehistory long before the Incas. We explore
these questions in Beresford-Jones & Heggarty (see chapter 53).
1
Of the various new hypotheses, not one entertains the popular myth of Tiyawanaku as a plausible homeland for
Aymara and explanation for its spread — for so many independent lines of linguistic and (ethno-)historical data (see
above) point so clearly against it, and to a homeland much further north-west instead. Even as late as the early
colonial period, language distributions in the Altiplano were quite different to today’s. Browman’s (1994) traditional
hypothesis that Tiyawanaku spread Aymara is thus “linguistically speaking, unsustainable” and “seriously invalidated”
(Cerrón-Palomino 2000: ). A better candidate is the Puquina language, though pace Stanish (2003), without any
Quechua impact on it at this period (Beresford-Jones & Heggarty forthcoming a: §1). What remains unsure is quite
how and at which point Aymara reached the Altiplano from further north, though its minimal dialectal diversity here
sets the plausible time-frame to no earlier than …

— 405 —
… the Late Intermediate Period, or even (early) Inca times. One obvious candidate for facilitating long-range
language ‘migrations’ across highland Southern Peru and the Titicaca Basin is highly-mobile camelid pastoralism
(Urton forthcoming, Lane forthcoming). Reinforcement of Aymara also continued throughout the colonial period and
even beyond.

2.3 DISTANT ORIGINS: CONVERGENCE, AGRICULTURE, AND INTENSIFICATION

For times before the Early Horizon, linguistics offers no evidence of migrations: no wider relationships in broader,
deeper-time families. An old hypothesis that Quechua and Aymara themselves might go back to a common
‘Quechumara’ origin has long been roundly rejected by specialists (Beresford-Jones & Heggarty forthcoming a: §3).
Rather, the picture is not of any great family, but of parallels only in broad linguistic structure across an Andean
‘language area’ (Torero 2002: ‐ ). This background pattern bears no marks of migrations and divergence, but
instead of a form of ‘core and periphery’ convergence that echoes more network-like and ‘down-the-line’ models of
interaction in archaeology (Heggarty & Renfrew forthcoming a: § . . , § . ). It seems more in line with a fairly
stable, long-term scenario of groups in relative balance, between whom local-level contact was the rule, along
extensive chains articulated by rolling bilingualism and thus language convergence. The ‘institutions of
complementarity’ so peculiar to the Andes (Beresford-Jones & Heggarty this volume) would seem a highly plausible
context. The lack of a single great, deep-time family suggests that no single player had especially dominant reach
across the others on any level that might drive a expansive language ‘migration’ of the scale seen in later periods.
To link the ‘Pre-Ceramic’ societies of the Norte Chico on Peru’s north-central coast, including the famous Caral,
with Quechua expansion is an anachronism (Heggarty & Beresford-Jones 2010: ). There is no linguistic evidence
of any significant expansive migrations at this stage.

At first sight this would seem to challenge the general ‘farming/language dispersal hypothesis’ (Bellwood &
Renfrew 2002); for agriculture began here as early as anywhere, but without any contemporary language spread.
Farming in the Andes followed a trajectory very different to the Old World, however. Key thresholds of
intensification, able to propel major population and language dispersals, were not crossed here until relatively late, at
time-depths much more in line with the expansions of the main Andean language families. The rise of the ‘Horizon’
societies might itself be in part associated with step gains in agricultural productivity: see Heggarty &
Beresford-Jones (2010).

3. FURTHER AFIELD, DEEPER IN TIME

Outside the core zone of Andean civilisation, most significant is that Chibcha, best known as the language
encountered by the Spaniards across the central Colombian highlands in Cundinamarca and Boyacá, is actually a
much wider family. Its relatives lie scattered through northern Colombia, and are at their most …

— 406 —
… diverse in southern Central America, thereby the default candidate for the original homeland out of which at least
some migration(s) must have emanated, at the very approximate order of some five millennia ago. Quite what
might have driven them, however, remains largely a matter of speculation (e.g. Constenla Umaña 1990). Certainly,
there is no evidence that Chibcha ever reached into, let alone connected, the heartlands of Meso-American and
Andean civilisation. Our knowledge of pre-Columbian languages elsewhere in the northern Andes is similarly limited,
and even less can be inferred about any migration histories, though various Carib languages do attest to long-range
migrations deep into Colombia from the family’s presumed homeland in the Guyana Shield. In the southern Andes,
too, our data are sparse, save for Mapuche (alias Araucanian or Mapudungun). The Mapuche homeland appears to
have lain around and south of the Maule River, where their resistance set the southern bounds to Inca expansion.
Mapuche dialectal diversity supports interpretations of migrations eastwards through the Andes, particularly in
recent centuries into enclaves across the Pampas, and pressurising native tongues of Patagonia such as Tehuelche.
See also Heggarty & Renfrew (forthcoming c: § . . , § . . ) and Adelaar with Muysken (2004: § , § ).

Further afield still, many a grand claim has been staked for language ‘relationships’ that would supposedly attest to
migrations of the most spectacular kind, between the Andes and other distant parts of the Americas. The ‘fatal
attraction’ of unlikely, long-lost links between far-flung languages has long marred linguistics (see Campbell 1997:
), and misdirected its resources away from our real data: dying native languages, undocumented and soon
irrecoverable. It would only be to lend such hypotheses undue credence to accord them any significant space at all.
At best the claims are absolutely unconfirmed; much more often, the putative patterns of correspondences are
simply ‘faces in the fire’, imagination more than meaningful evidence of anything. Two language lineages of the
Bolivian Altiplano suffice to illustrate: there is in fact no convincing linguistic case that the extinct and little
documented Puquina is related to Arawak; much less still that Uru has any connection to Mayan. See further
Campbell (1997: ‐ ).

The same methodological warnings apply a fortiori to supposed linguistic insights into first human settlement of the
New World. Notwithstanding the grand claims, native languages in fact offer no meaningful evidence for or against
any of the main migration scenarios; even the shallowest, Clovis chronology lies beyond the time-depth limits on
historical linguistic methodology (Goddard & Campbell 1994). And as for Greenberg’s (1987) imagined vast pan-
American language family, the perspective from the Andes only further rebuts it. His ‘Amerind’ construct totters
many speculative levels above the already artificial ‘Quechumara’; while in his actual data on Quechua “the number
of erroneous forms probably exceeds that of the correct forms” (Adelaar 1989: ). For fuller coverage and
references, see Heggarty & Renfrew (forthcoming c: § ) and Campbell (1997).

Almost all linguistic ‘evidence’ of trans-Pacific contacts also comes to nothing (Adelaar with Muysken 2004: )—
save for just one arresting case. The words for the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) in a number of Oceanic
languages are strikingly reminiscent of Quechua and Aymara k’umar(a) (Adelaar 1998). This could be a mere fluke;
occasional one-off resemblances are statistically inevitable (witness English much and Spanish mucho, not in fact
related). But the plot thickens in that the cultivar itself is of South American origin, and a few radiocarbon dates
suggest that it may conceivably have reached Polynesia in the last centuries before European contact — not that
the linguistics confirms any such chronology. Indeed it is crucial to understand the limits of what the k’umar(a)
data actually mean: a long-distance movement, perhaps, but of a quintessential loanword. The only linguistic
intimation there may be, then, would be of a sporadic long-distance contact between the Andes and Polynesia at a
date unknown; not of any migration proper that led to permanent settlement, much less of any shared linguistic
ancestry across the Pacific.

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1
We prefer this spelling as closer to the original indigenous pronunciation, restoring the second syllable -ya- suggested both by
etymology and by the original Hispanicised version Tiahuanaco.

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