It is the seventh-most widely spoken language in Argentina behind Spanish, Italian, Levantine Arabic, South Bolivian Quechua, Standard German, and Mapudungun.

Quechuan, Peripheral Quechua, Chinchay[citation needed] The indigenous people of Santiago del Estero were referred to as the "tonocoté".

The government even went so far as to release flyers describing what these indigenous people looked like, including red skin and the use of feathers in their clothing.

It has been discovered that a new category of verb exists in this Quechua language: Pasado no experimentado, which adds a certain suffix to words to represent information that has been related to someone from another person.

[3] As opposed to other dialects of this language, which use the phoneme /ʎ/, Saniagueño Quechua possesses /ʒ ~ ʑ/, similar to the Argentinian Spanish pronunciation of /ʎ ~ ʝ/ as [ʒ ~ ʑ].