How Quechua Makes You Account for Emotion: The Linguistics of Grief

By Selina Huang

Two Quechua women outside a traditional Andean home. In communities like these, language is not only a tool for communication but also carries deep cultural responsibilities. Photo by Gustavo Leighton on Unsplash

Recent advances in psycholinguistics and cultural anthropology reveal how linguistic structures influence grief. In Quechua, a major Indigenous language family spoken in the Andes, the grammar requires speakers to specify the source of their knowledge for nearly every declarative statement. This system of evidentiality uses grammatical markers such as

-mi (direct evidence), -chá (inferred evidence), and -si (reported or hearsay evidence) to indicate how the speaker knows what they are saying. For example, if a speaker saw María crying, they would say María llakiy-mi (“María is sad-I saw it myself”). If they inferred her sadness from her behavior, such as skipping meals, they would say María llakiy-chá. If they heard from someone else that María is sad, they must say María llakiy-si. Omitting the evidential marker would render the sentence incomplete or ungrammatical in natural Quechua speech (Aikhenvald 2004; Faller 2002).

This obligatory grammatical encoding has powerful implications for how emotional states like grief are expressed. Speakers must constantly reflect on the source, reliability, and ownership of their statements—even when discussing deeply personal or subjective experiences. This leads to what anthropologist Alessandro Duranti calls “epistemic positioning”: a linguistic practice that defines the speaker’s relationship to knowledge, which in turn shapes their social identity and emotional stance (Duranti 1993). In contexts of mourning, Quechua speakers cannot merely say “I am sad”; they must indicate whether their sadness is based on a firsthand experience, an internal conjecture, or the report of another. This introduces a layer of epistemic humility that is largely absent from languages like English.

English, by contrast, does not have a grammatical evidentiality system. Speakers can say “María is sad” without specifying how they know this. The source of information may be implied or clarified with optional adverbial phrases such as “I heard that,” “apparently,” or “I think,” but these are not grammatically required. This flexibility allows English speakers to narrate emotional experiences with far greater fluidity and ambiguity. While such freedom may facilitate expressive storytelling, it can also obscure the boundaries between personal experience, speculation, and hearsay. In grief narratives, especially, this distinction matters: recounting a loved one’s death with “I saw it happen” versus “I heard about it” invokes different levels of emotional immediacy and trust.

By comparing Quechua and English, we see how the grammar of grief is shaped by cultural expectations about knowledge, speech, and emotion. Where English allows speakers to dissolve boundaries between different types of emotional experience, Quechua obliges them to confront and declare those boundaries explicitly. In this way, linguistic structures not only constrain or expand expression—they shape the very ethics of speaking about loss.

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Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Faller, Martina. "Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality at the Semantics–Pragmatics Interface." PhD diss., Stanford University, 2002. http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/martina.faller/publications.html

Duranti, Alessandro. “Truth and Intentionality: An Ethnographic Critique.” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2 (1993): 214–245. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1993.8.2.02a00030