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Culle

South American Language Families

Culle, also spelled Culli or Ilinga, was a poorly documented language of the Andean highlands of northern Peru, spoken across the regions of La Libertad, Cajamarca and Ancash. It is treated as a language isolate with no confirmed relatives among other languages of the Andes. The main surviving records come from an eighteenth-century manuscript compiled by the bishop Baltasar Jaime Martinez Companon and vocabulary gathered in 1934 by the linguist Paul Rivet from earlier sources; the language is generally considered to have gone extinct by the mid-twentieth century as Spanish and Quechua came to dominate the region, though some accounts raise the possibility of undocumented speakers in remote villages.

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