The term Southern Quechua refers to the Quechuan varieties spoken in regions of the Andes south of a line roughly east–west between the cities of Huancayo and Huancavelica in central Peru.
It includes the Quechua varieties spoken in the regions of Ayacucho, Cusco and Puno in Peru, in much of Bolivia and parts of north-west Argentina.
The most widely spoken varieties are Cusco, Ayacucho, Puno (Collao), and South Bolivian.
Santiagueño Quechua in Argentina is divergent, and appears to derive from a mix of dialects, including South Bolivian.
[5] The most salient distinction between Ayacucho Quechua and the others is that it lacks the aspirated (tʃʰ, pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, qʰ) and ejective (tʃʼ, pʼ, tʼ, kʼ, qʼ) series of stop consonants.
It is a compromise of conservative features in the pronunciations of the various regions that speak forms of Southern Quechua.
The letters e and o are not used for native Quechua words because the corresponding sounds are simply allophones of i and u that appear predictably next to q, qh, and q'.
The letters appear, however, in proper names or words adopted directly from Spanish: c, v, x, z; j (in Peru; in Bolivia, it is used instead of h).
All varieties of Quechua are very regular agglutinative languages, as opposed to isolating or fusional ones [Thompson].
Notable grammatical features include bipersonal conjugation (verbs agree with both subject and object), evidentiality (indication of the source and veracity of knowledge), a set of topic particles, and suffixes indicating who benefits from an action and the speaker's attitude toward it, but some varieties may lack some of the characteristics.
Quechua also adds the suffix -kuna to the second and third person singular pronouns qam and pay to create the plural forms, qam-kuna and pay-kuna.
Noun roots accept suffixes that indicate person (defining of possession, not identity), number, and case.
[7] Local and temporal concepts of adverbs in Quechua (as well as in Aymara) are associated to each other reversely, compared to European languages.