The Inga People are an indigenous ethnic group from the Southwest region of Colombia

Colombia

Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

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They speak a dialect of Quechua

Quechua languages

Quechua is a Native South American language family and dialect cluster spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably...

 known as Inga Kichwa

Inga Kichwa

Inga Kichwa is a Quechua language spoken in the Colombian Putumayo region by the Inga people. There are two dialects: Highland Inga, spoken in the Sibundoy valley; and Jungle Inga, spoken on the Putumayo and Japurá Rivers. Inga Kichwa belongs to Quechua II subgroup Kichwa .-External links:*...

. Almost all Inga people are bi-lingual in Inga and Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, which has caused fear that the Inga language might be an endangered language

Endangered language

An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....

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Many today live traditionally in Sibundoy Valley

Sibundoy

Sibundoy is a town and municipality located in the Putumayo Department, Republic of Colombia.This town existed well before the Spanish came in 1534. The Incan under Huayna Cápac conquered the local people in 1492 and established a Quechua-speaking settlement. The descendants of these people are the...

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Francisco Tandioy Jansasoy is currently involved in the creation of an Inga-Spanish-English dictionary and accompanying pedagogic tri-lingual material for its use in universities and in the Inga-speaking communities of Colombia. There has been significant linguistic

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and anthropological

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

work done in the past 30 years pertaining to the Inga peoples.