Quichua, spelt Kichwa in Ecuador, is the name for the northern branch of the Quechuan language family, spoken mainly in the highlands and Amazon region of Ecuador, with the related Inga varieties across the border in southern Colombia. It is a relative of the Quechua spoken in Peru and Bolivia, but the branches have grown apart and are not always mutually intelligible. Speaker estimates for Ecuador vary considerably, from several hundred thousand in census returns to over a million in community counts. Ecuador's 2008 constitution names Kichwa an official language of intercultural relations, and it features in bilingual schooling programmes. A unified spelling system based on the Latin alphabet was agreed in the late twentieth century. The grammar is agglutinative, building long words from a root followed by a chain of suffixes.
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