ethnic group became equated with the Aymara language, consigning the
Puquina-Colla peoples to oblivion, as recent ethnohistorical research has
indicated.
Regarding the historical and sociocultural context, once Aymara was ruled out
as the language of Tiahuanaco, Puquina remained as the possible language of
that civilization, based on the geographic coverage indicated in the documents
that exist and on onomastic research, which supports that hypothesis. The
traditional idea that altiplano place names derived mostly from Aymara,
therefore, is not supported, as recent onomastic investigation shows that place
names that can be attributed to Puquina coincide almost perfectly with the
territory that archaeologists postulate for Tiahuanaco.
If the hypothesis that Puquina was the language of Tiahuanaco is accepted,
then it follows that the “particular language” of the Incas, which Colonial
sources say was different from Aymara and Quechua, could have been a form of
Puquina spoken by descendants of the altiplano migrants who, after the collapse
of the Tiahuanaco civilization, moved toward Cuzco in search of better land.
Linguistic, documentary, and archaeological evidence in recent years appears to
support that hypothesis. It would not be surprising, therefore, if much of the
cultural and institutional vocabulary of the Inca Empire, incorporated into
Quechua and/or Aymara, could only be explained by Puquina etymology. This
would indicate that the primordial language of the ancestors of the mythical
Incas could have been Puquina, a minority language replaced, by the second or
third generation, by Aymara, which was the predominant language at the time in
the Cuzco valley.
Further Reading
Adelaar, Willem, with Pieter Muysken. “Puquina and Callahuaya.” In The Languages of the Andes, edited
by Willem Adelaar with Pieter Muysken, 350–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Bouysse-Cassagne, Thérèse. “Apuntes para la historia de los puquina hablantes.” In Boletín de Arqueología
PUCP no. 14: 283–307, 2011.
Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo. “Unravelling the Enigma of the ‘Particular Language’ of the Incas.” In
Archaeology and Language in the Andes, edited by Paul Heggarty and David Beresford-Jones, 265–94.
Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Domínguez, Nicanor. “Para una cartografía de la lengua puquina en el altiplano colonial (1548–1610).”
Boletín de Arqueología PUCP 14:309–28, 2011.
Torero, Alfredo. “Puquina.” In Idiomas de los Andes. Lingüística e historia, by Alfredo Torero, 389–456.
Lima: Editorial Horizonte e IFEA, 2002.
■RODOLFO CERRÓN-PALOMINO (TRANSLATED BY BARBARA FRASER)