Quechua

CLACS offers elementary and intermediate courses in Quechua, an Andean indigenous language spoken by over 10 million people. Including the variant Kichwa (or Quichwa), Quechua is the most widely spoken native american language in the Americas. Also known as runa simi ("people's language"), it is spoken in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, with the largest number of native speakers in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru.

Quechua courses satisfy the language requirements of the College of Arts of Sciences, the undergraduate major in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Graduate School.

Learn more about the student Runasimi Outreach Collective which promotes Andean culture and Quechua-language learning.

Odi Gonzalez Jimenez is a Peruvian writer, translator, and professor of Spanish and Quechua at New York University. He published in Spanish the poetry books Juego de niños (1988), Valle sagrado (1993), Almas en pena (1998) and La escuela de Cusco (2005). In 1992 Gonzales obtained the César Vallejo National Poetry Prize and the Poetry Prize by National University of San Marcos in Lima. In 2002, he published Tunupa. El libro de las sirenas, a book with poems in Quechua. In 2000 Gonzales published a Spanish translation of the Quechua poetry book Taki parwa by Andrés Alencastre Gutiérrez. In 2019 he was an invited speaker at the literary Hay Festival in Arequipa. In 2014 some of his poems were translated into English by Lynn Levin, writer and instructor at the University of Pennsylvania.