Language and Society in Early Colonial Peru

Abstract

Historians have neglected the study of how language and society related to each other in the early colonial Andes. This chapter examines the possible reasons for this significant gap in the historiography, and discusses the contributions that linguists have made over the past decades to a greater understanding of the history of Andean languages and their speakers both before and after the Spanish Conquest. I consider some avenues by which historical research could enrich our knowledge about the field, which involves identifying the speakers of Andean languages and reconstructing the context in which they lived. To this end, and using ethnohistorical information from published sources and my own archival research, I discuss two examples that linguists have studied or hypothesized on. The first concerns the central coast of Peru, the spread of Quechua, and the possible relations between speakers of various Andean languages in the area, particularly the Lima valley. The second case involves the problem of what were the boundaries of Quechua in the Cuzco region, which I investigate by examining evidence of resettlement policies under the Inca, which to an extent continued for a few decades after the Spanish Conquest. The final part of this chapter discusses how the indigenous population of the cities of Lima and Cuzco related to the Spanish language.KeywordsIndian PopulationColonial PeriodEarly ColonialCentral CoastColonial GovernmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.