Do languages have to have writing and is Quechua a language?

Answer 1

Technically speaking, languages do not have to have a written form although the more advanced a society becomes, there becomes a need to record. Ancient tribes found ways to communicate but did not write. In the purest sense, even animals communicate and, being the thumbless creatures that they are, don't have symbols to recreate that communication. I guess by leaving their scent they are leaving a form of non-verbal expression.

Quechua (Runa Simi; Kichwa in Ecuador) is a Native American language of South America. It was the language of the Inca Empire, and is today spoken in various dialects by some 10 million people throughout South America, including Peru and Bolivia, southern Colombia and Ecuador, north-western Argentina and northern Chile. It is the most widely spoken of all American Indian languages.

Quechua is a very regular agglutinative language, with a normal sentence order of SOV (subject-object-verb). Its large number of infixes and suffixes change both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning, allowing great expressiveness. Notable grammatical features include bipersonal conjugation (verbs agree with both subject and object), evidentiality (indication of the source and veracity of knowledge), a topic particle, and suffixes indicating who benefits from an action and the speaker's attitude toward it.

Answer 2

No, a language does not have to have writing to be considered a "real" language. There are many that have no writing.
In Latin America there were only three that had some kind of writing: Aztec, Maya and Inca. The last did not have a type of writing that we would recognize, but they recorded data in a so-called QUIPU, a contraption of threads and knots.
For more information on the Quipu go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
Quechua is one of the Native American languages without writing, that is spoken by large numbers of people and (I believe) it is an official language in some of the Pacific rim countries.

Answer 3

No, languages do not have to have a written form. If you think about it, every normal human being learns to use language way before we learn any writing system. After all, we don't start to teach kids to read and write until they are about age 6, and they have already been speaking years before that. There are many languages even today that don't have written forms, and that's totally okay.

Quechua is definitely a language.

Answer 4

John Y nailed this answer.