The Mochica language was spoken along the northwest coast of Peru and in some inland villages and was first documented in 1607. It was widely spoken in the area during the 17th and early 18th century. By the end of the 19th century the language was dying out and spoken only by a few people in the villages around Chiclayo. It died out as a spoken language around 1920, but certain words and phrases continued to be used up until the 1960s.

Mochica is typologically different from the other main languages on the west coast of South America (Quechua, Aymara, and Mapudungun) and contains rare features. These include

• a case system where cases are built on each other in a linear sequence: the ablative suffix is added to the locative which itself is added to an oblique case form
• all nouns have two stems, possessed and non-possessed
• an agentive case suffix mainly used for the agent in passive clauses
• a verbal system where all finite forms are formed with the copula.

Mochica appears to be an isolated language with no clear links to any other American Indian language.

External links

• Abstract of Mochica from the Languages of the World series