Quechumaran languages
Quechumaran or Kechumaran is a language-family proposal that unites Quechua and Aymara. Quechuan languages, especially those of the south, share a large amount of vocabulary with Aymara. The hypothesis of the existence of Quechuamara was originally posted by linguist Norman McQuown in 1955. Terrence Kaufman finds the proposal reasonably convincing, but Willem Adelaar, a Quechua specialist, believes the similarities to be caused by borrowing during long-term contact. Lyle Campbell suspects that the proposal is valid but does not consider it to have been conclusively proved.
| Quechumaran | |
|---|---|
| (controversial) | |
| Geographic distribution | Andes |
| Linguistic classification | Proposed language family |
| Subdivisions | |
| Glottolog | None |
Moulian et al. (2015) posits the Puquina language of the Tiwanaku Empire as a possible source for some of the shared vocabulary between Quechua, Aymara and Mapuche.
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) also groups Quechuan and Aymaran together. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.