Microsoft Speaks the Language of the Incas

August 27th, 2006

After launching the Quechua versions of Windows and Office near Cusco in June 2006, Microsoft continues with the deployment of its Inca-speaking packages. An article appeared in SFGate.com by Associated Press writer Dan Keane (Friday, August 25), reports on the Bolivia roll-out of MS’s best selling packages.

The Quechua versions of Windows and Office were first launched during a ceremony held at the Andean city of Pisaq (department of Cusco), at more that 3,000 m.a.s.l. The ceremony was attended by Eliane Karp de Toledo (Peru’s First Lady at the time), who commented that the project would take a huge step in reverting the native’s social and technological exclusion, opening for them the doors to the 21st century.The Quechua-patch is available for download online for free. Once installed, it translates the Microsoft commands and menus into the Inca language. According to Dan Keane’s article, “Microsoft teamed up with several universities in Peru’s Quechua-speaking south to create the translation program”. This Quechua edition of Microsoft programs adds up to other versions in far from widespread languages, such as Maori and Zulu.

The project, says Keane, in spite of the fact that few of South America’s estimated 10 million Quechua speakers have regular access to a computer, has already produced dividends, as the company “recently won a contract from the Peruvian government for 5,000 Quechua-equipped computers.”Quechua, the language of the Incas and -together with Spanish- one of Peru’s official languages, is spoken by some 3 million people, mostly in the poor Southern Andes highlands. Throughout South America, however, it’s today spoken, in various dialects, by some 10 million people, including Peru and Bolivia, southern Colombia and Ecuador, north-western Argentina and northern Chile. It is the most widely spoken of all American Indian languages.

Quechua is a very regular agglutinative language, with a normal sentence order of SOV (subject-object-verb). Its large number of infixes and suffixes change both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning, allowing great expressiveness (Source: Wikipedia).

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