Manuel Tenorio, over sixty years old, and a Quechua peasant from central Ecuador, recounts how he learned Spanish as a boy, on the job at the hacienda and during visits to the market town. When a white man came by on horseback, Manuel was obliged to say the greeting alabado sacramento ‘blessed (be the) Sacrament’ or alabado evangelio ‘blessed (be the) Gospel’, and was answered back alabado hijo ‘blessed (be the) Son’ (perhaps also ‘blessed, sonny’). However, as a Quechua speaker he had great difficulties with the vowels [e] and [o] (often pronouncing them as [ⅰ] and [u], respectively), and the punishment for mispronunciation was fierce, so he used to dive into the irrigation channel when he heard a horse approaching. Almost at the end of his life, in spite of years in the capital as a construction worker, his Spanish still shows many traces of his Indian background.

The Spaniards have imposed their language in all their former colonies in the New World. Not only the immigrants from Europe speak Spanish, but the descendants of the African slaves and Chinese coolies, and a large part of the native Amerindian population as well. Nonetheless, the transplanted forms of the language have undergone many modifications, as in the speech of Manuel Tenorio, and the relationship between Spanish and the dominated Amerindian languages is a complex one.

In this chapter we discuss various aspects of the relation between Spanish and the native languages of the Andes.