Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [198]
The Tiahuanaco rulers, apparently finding their old home threatened by mud slides, then moved across or round Lake Titicaca, to set up a new base of command in Cuzco: this began the ascent of the Inca, immortalised in their mythology as the career of their first king, Manco Capac, who emerged from the lake, bearing a golden sceptre that would show where they should settle. (Only at Cuzco could it be plunged straight into the ground.) He came with his wife Mama Ocllo, and together (but respectively) they taught men and women the arts of civilisation. At this point, the Incas accepted Aymara de facto as the language of their kingdom, preserving Puquina as an elite language for court use. (Of course, it continued to be used by their ‘poor relations’, left behind south of Lake Titicaca.) Cuzco must have been a bilingual city. This situation did not change for some nine generations (from the Incas Manco Capac to Pachacutec), as the realm of the Incas was expanded east, south and finally northward.
Then, in the time of Inca Pachacutec, serious aggression began. Expansion northward brought the Inca domains into conflict with the Chincha: but the solution found was peaceable and extremely positive. Pachacutec (already married to his own sister) offered his son, the formidable Tupac Yupanqui, in marriage to a Chincha princess, and the result was a merging of the Inca and Chincha domains. This led to a switch of imperial language, from Aymara to Quechua, presumably reflecting a judgement on which was more widespread and useful in the combined Inca and Chincha domains. For a time, Cuzco became a trilingual city. This would have been much less than a hundred years before the Spanish conquest in 1528. Cuzco Quechua, for all its political importance, was still seen as a substandard variety, which interpreters from the north liked to look down on. The new language was then projected with the sudden, and extremely warlike, advances of the empire which, under Tupac Yupanqui, took it northward to Quito, incorporating the significant Chimú state on the way, and southward into Chile.
Father Blas Valera insists on the explicit language acculturation policies pursued by the Incas within their domains.
It remains to say something of the lengua general of the natives of Peru, which although it is true that each province has its own language different from the others, there is one universal one that they call Cuzco, which in the time of the Inca kings was used from Quito to the kingdom of Chile and the kingdom of Tucuman, and now the chieftains use it and the Indians who the Spaniards hold as servants and to administer business. The Inca kings, from antiquity, as soon as they subjected any kingdom or province, would … order their vassals to learn the courtly language of Cuzco and to teach it to their children. And to make sure that this command was not vain, they would give them Indians native to Cuzco to teach them the language and the customs of the court. To whom, in such provinces and villages, they would give houses, lands and estates so that, naturalizing themselves there, they should become perpetual teachers and their children after them. And the Inca governors preferred in the offices of the state, in peace as in war, those who best spoke the lengua general. On these terms, the Incas ruled and governed their whole empire in peace and quiet, and the vassals of various nations were like brothers, because all of them spoke one language…23
And Inca Garcilaso adds:
Those kings also sent the heirs of the lords of the vassals to be educated at the court and reside there until they came into their inheritance, to have them well taught and to accustom themselves to the condition and customs of the Incas, treating them kindly, so that afterwards, on the strength of their past communion and familiarity they should love them and serve them with affection: they called them mítmac, because they were newcomers… This injunction made it easier for the lengua general to be learnt with more enjoyment and less effort and grief … Whenever they