The Puquina Language in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial Andean Society: Integrating Insights from Written Documents and Historical Linguistics

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Puquina language was widely spoken alongside Quechua and Aymara in the Andean highlands around Lake Titicaca. However, unlike Quechua and Aymara, Puquina quickly declined in prominence, and eventually disappeared from the written record in the 19th century. Puquina has been something of an enigma in our understanding of late precolonial and early colonial Andean society: while it was clearly an important language, few written documents exist to tell us what the language was like, and what its place in the region's social and political panorama might have been. This presentation describes how the scant written materials regarding Puquina can be interpreted alongside emerging historical linguistic findings about the language. Written documents include church records, which give us a sense of where Puquina was spoken; and a priests' manual published in 1607, which is the only surviving text in Puquina and provides basic information on the grammatical structure and lexicon of the language. New historical linguistic findings come from a systematic analysis of contact-induced change and lexical borrowing among Puquina, Aymara, and Quechua. In particular, there appears to have been a great amount of Puquina lexical borrowing in the local variety of Aymara, which was copiously documented by the Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio in 1612. These Puquina terms can be recovered from the written Aymara sources using a combination of traditional comparative methods and new computational methods. Integrating these sources of information with written documents about Puquina allows us to forge new insights about Andean history, the historical linguistics of Western South America, and the transformation of the region’s sociolinguistic ecology between the Inca and colonial periods.