Encyclopedia of the Incas

was coined by the Spaniards, based on the name of the ethnic group who spoke
it, and could be formally reconstructed as *puqi-na, although the meaning, apart
from the ethnic group, remains obscure.
The scant available documentation indicates that it was an agglutinative
language, in which words were created by adding suffixes. For a long time, it
was confused with the Uru language of the islands of Lake Titicaca and Lake
Coipasa. But thanks to new information about the Uru language, which survives
in the Bolivian altiplano, they are now recognized as different. Some
grammatical elements of the language, particularly possessives, are formed using
quasi-prefixes in a system reminiscent of the Arawak languages (as described by
Raoul de la Grasserie in 1894), leading some experts to suggest that they are
related, although that is difficult to prove because of the lack of available
materials.
According to Colonial documents, and based on place-name evidence that has
come to light in recent years, it appears that the language was spoken over a
wide area that centered on the region around Lake Titicaca and extended
northward to what are now the provinces of Canas and Canchis in the
department of Cuzco, Peru; westward over the western slope of the Andes to the
Pacific coast, from Cailloma, in the Peruvian department of Arequipa, to
Tarapacá in Chile; and eastward across the piedmont of the eastern mountains in
what are now the provinces of Carabaya and Sandia in the Peruvian department
of Puno, and in Bolivia to northwestern La Paz and the regions of Cochabamba
and Sucre, reaching Potosí in the south. Such vast coverage, still apparent in the
sixteenth century (although somewhat fragmented) led the Colonial authorities
to declare it one of the “general languages” of Colonial Peru, along with
Quechua and Aymara. Nevertheless, Colonial sources indicate that by the time
the Spaniards arrived, the highly fragmented language was already being
replaced by Aymara and Quechua. That could at least partly explain why the
Spanish evangelizers never wrote grammars or vocabularies for the language.
Unlike the Quechua and Aymara people, Puquina speakers have essentially
been erased from Colonial historical accounts. Although some sources refer to
Collas and Puquinas as related ethnic groups, most eventually reflected the idea
that the Collas should be understood to be Aymara speakers. The Incas might
have been responsible for that confusion, because after the bloody battle with the
Colla chief in his stronghold of Hatuncolla, they used that landmark event to
give the name Collasuyu to the region around that capital, which was populated
by Aymara chiefdoms. As the Puquina language gave way to Aymara, the Colla