Alfredo Torero

Alfredo Augusto Torero Fernández de Córdova (September 10, 1930 in Huacho, Lima Region, Peru – June 19, 2004 in Valencia, Spain) was a Peruvian anthropologist and linguist.

He was a student at the National University of San Marcos, from which he graduated in the early 1960s, and then traveled to France, where he continued his doctorate at the University of Paris. There he obtained a doctorate in 1965, under the direction of the linguist André Martinet, with his thesis Le puquina, la troisième langue générale du Pérou.

Alfredo Torero came to prominence thanks to his article "The Dialects of Quechua" in 1964 and ranks among the founders of Andean linguistics. Much of his work is characterised by bringing into his linguistic investigations also cultural aspects of the Andean peoples. Besides Quechua and Aymara, he researched extinct languages such as Mochica and Puquina.

The present classification of the Quechua language family is based fundamentally on his analysis and that of Gary Parker, who, independently, came to similar conclusions.

He found that Quechua clearly did not originate, as is still often believed, in the region of the Inca capital Cuzco, but almost certainly somewhere considerably further north in Central Peru. Torero's proposed precise homeland for Quechua was the central coast of Peru in the Lima Region, but that remains both unproven and challenged by other linguists.

The Alfredo Torero auditorium at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, National University of San Marcos in Lima is named after him.