Quechuan and Aymaran spelling shift

In recent years, Peru and Bolivia have revised the official spelling for place-names originating from Aymara and the Quechuan languages. A standardized alphabet for Quechua was adopted by the Peruvian government in 1975; a revision in 1985 moved to a three-vowel orthography.

The major changes are to replace the digraph hu with the single letter w, and to replace the consonants c/q[u] with either k or q, as appropriate in the word in question. K and q represent different sounds in most Andean languages: k is a velar stop, as in Spanish and English; q is a uvular stop [q]. As Spanish does not have uvular [q], traditional spellings lose this distinction (although sometimes a double cc was used to represent the k-like sounds of Quechua that differed from the "plain k" sound known in Spanish; e.g., in place names such as Ccarhuacc, Chopcca, Cconocc, Llacce, Manyacc, Chihuilluyocc, Chilcahuaycco, etc.), and Quechua or Aymara sources must be consulted to select the right consonant. For instance, the Temple of the Sun in Cusco is called the Qurikancha in Quechua, with both sounds (quri "gold", kancha "courtyard, enclosure"), and is spelled Coricancha in hispanicized spelling.

Additionally, the phoneme inventory of Quechua and Aymara includes just three vowels, /a/, /i/, and /u/. Older Spanish transcriptions (as well as the 1975 standard) used the letters o and e as well; this is because the pronunciation of /u/ and /i/ opens to [o] and [e] adjacent to a /q/, an instance of allophonic variation. For instance, Quechua qucha 'lake' sounds to Spanish speakers like cocha, as in the sample Huiracocha below. Some sources, such as dictionary published by the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, still use the five-vowel 1975 orthography.

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