did the incas speak quechua
It is indeed a great pity that the Incas never had the opportunity, as did the Greeks and Romans, to come in contact with a people like the Phoenicians who were clever enough to invent an alphabet. The language of the Incas was the Quichua or Quechua tongue.Originally it was used only in a small area around Cuzco where the Inca dynasty originated, possibly in the tenth or eleventh century.uring the next five hundred years, when the Incas succeeded in subduing the native races as far north as Ecuador and as far south as Argentina, they carried the Quechua language with them and insisted in its being learned by the conquered peoples so that it had a wide distribution by the end of the sixteenth century.