Hello LINGUIST List readers,

Here we are again, ready to share more Fun Facts that'll get you thinking and bring a linguistic twist to your day!

Today, we're reflecting on one of the rich linguistic features of Quechua: evidentiality.

In Quechua, the grammar requires that speakers indicate the source of their information, whether it is based on personal experience, hearsay, or inference. This means that every sentence in Quechua carries a wealth of information about the speaker’s knowledge and perspective, making it a highly nuanced and precise language. This linguistic feature reflects the speaker's viewpoint, mirroring their level of certainty or the source of their knowledge.

Direct evidentiality is used when the speaker has firsthand knowledge or witnessed the event themselves. Indirect evidentiality is used when the speaker does not have direct knowledge of the event, but has inferred it from some evidence or indirect means. Reported evidentiality is used when the speaker is reporting information that they heard from someone else.

Evidential morphemes are added to the end of the verb in Quechua, and there are several different evidential markers that are used depending on the type of evidence being conveyed. For example, the direct evidential marker “-mi” indicates that the speaker has personal knowledge of the event, while the reporting evidential marker “-shi” indicates that the information is being reported by others. The indirect evidential marker “-chá” indicates that the information is an inference, a speculation, assumption or hypothesis.

For more about Quechua, visit https://www.lengua.com/blog/rare-languages-1-quechua/

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