Quechua in Peruvian Spanish: papa, choclo, palta, cancha

Explanation

The densest layer is agricultural and culinary, which is unsurprising given what the Andes contributed to the world's food. Papa is the potato — the Peninsular patata is a later blend, and papa is what most of Latin America says. Choclo is corn on the cob, mote is boiled hominy, and cancha is toasted maize, the bowl of which arrives free with a beer; the same word for a sports pitch is a separate development. Palta is the avocado (aguacate elsewhere, from Nahuatl — the two great indigenous vocabularies of Spanish meeting on one fruit). Add quinua, charqui, which travelled into English as jerky, and yapa, the small extra a market seller adds to your order.

Land, weather and body supply another set. Chacra is a smallholding, pampa a plain, huayco a landslide of mud and rock after rain, and soroche is altitude sickness — a word you will need within an hour of landing in Cusco. Calato, from Quechua q'ala, means naked. Chullo is the earflapped knitted hat. Pucho, a cigarette or a butt-end, is Quechua too. And a set of words entered general Spanish so thoroughly that their origin is invisible: cóndor, puma, vicuña, guano, coca.

Two things to say honestly. First, the substrate is not only lexical: Andean Peruvian Spanish also shows Quechua-shaped syntax — the doubled possessive de Juan su casa, object-before-verb order, heavy use of the gerund, and a reportive dice or diciendo marking hearsay. That is a grammatical accent, not an error, and it is stigmatised in Lima in ways worth knowing about. Second, the sociolinguistics around this vocabulary is charged: terms like cholo carry a history of racial and class marking and can be affectionate, neutral or insulting depending entirely on who says them to whom. A learner is better off knowing the word than using it.

Examples

Related rules

• Quechua loanwords in Bolivian Spanish
• Aymara influence in highland Spanish
• Peruvian everyday words: grifo, chompa, pata, al toque
• Ya pe: how pues shrinks to pe in Peruvian Spanish
• Guaraní influence: a bilingual country