John C Rigdon

Essential English / Spanish / Quechua Dictionary John C Rigdon

This dictionary pairs 28,000 words in English with Spanish and Quechua. We have focused on the Southern Bolivia dialect of Quechua and Spanish as commonly used in central and South America. Peru became the first country to recognize Quechua as one of its official languages in 1975. Ecuador conferred official status on the language in its 2006 constitution and in 2009 Bolivia adopted a new constitution that recognized Quechua as one of the official languages of the country. In recent years, Quechua has been introduced in intercultural bilingual education (IBE) in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Currently, the major obstacle to the diffusion of the usage and teaching of Quechua is the lack of written material such as books, newspapers, software, and magazines in the Quechua language. Thus, Quechua, along with Aymara and the minor indigenous languages, remains essentially a spoken language.