World Language Map

Where is Cusco Quechua spoken?

Cusco Quechua is a Quechuan language, spoken in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Cusco Quechua is spoken

Cusco Quechua is spoken in 3 countries: Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Peru15%4,890,030
Bolivia32%3,939,840
Ecuador17%3,112,700

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Cusco Quechua has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Cusco Quechua?

Wikidata gives about 1.5 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 1989). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Cusco Quechua sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Cusco Quechua as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Quechuan
  2. Southern Quechua
  3. Cuscan Quechua
  4. Cusco Quechua

Related languages

Other languages in the Cuscan Quechua group:

More about Cusco Quechua

Codes: ISO 639-3 quz, Glottolog cusc1236. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Cusco Quechua

Where is Cusco Quechua spoken?

Cusco Quechua is spoken in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. Unicode CLDR puts it at 15% of the population of Peru, which is about 4,890,030 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Cusco Quechua?

Wikidata gives about 1.5 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 1989). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Cusco Quechua in?

Glottolog places Cusco Quechua in the Quechuan family, in the branch Southern Quechua and Cuscan Quechua.

Embed this map

Copy this code into your web page. It is free to use. Please keep the link under the map, as it is how people find where the map comes from.