Speaker | Bridging Language Education, Variation, and Speech Community: Puno Quechua

Quechua languages are spoken by 8–10 million people in South America, yet among the 40+ Quechua varieties identified by ISO 639-3 and Ethnologue, only four broad groups are recognised by the Government of Peru, none with its own language ID. Puno Quechua (qxp), a Collao variety of Southern Quechua with 25 consonants and 3 vowels, has around 474,000 speakers, and the share of Quechua speakers in Puno fell from 87% in 1940 to 38% in 2007. This talk presents a participatory language planning process with the National University of Altiplano Puno, the Puno Regional Government and the Illariy Ch’aska Association: planning (language identification, partners, needs assessment, incentives), preparation (onboarding Puno Quechua to Mozilla Common Voice and focusing on agriculture, economy and technology), collection (training contributors in reading, speaking, listening and writing, with validation and privacy-preserving procedures) and deployment (open release under CC0-1.0 on Mozilla Data Collective). Of 396 registrations, 151 people contributed, producing ~35h of scripted speech, ~35h of spontaneous speech and ~20K sentences, released as Common Voice Scripted Speech v26 and Spontaneous Speech v4.

Twelfth Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment (CELC 2026), July 13, 2026