Region eastern Bolivia Language family unclassified Linguist list 0is | Extinct 17th century ISO 639-3 None (mis) Glottolog None | |
Gorgotoqui is a currently undocumented extinct language of the Chiquitania region of the eastern Bolivian lowlands.
During the period of the Jesuit missions to Chiquitos, Gorgotoqui was the most populous language of the area. It became a lingua franca and the sole language of the Jesuit mission (ICOMOS 1990:59). A Jesuit priest wrote a grammar, but no-one has been able to locate it "in recent years" (Adelaar & Muysken 2004:32), and no other documentation has survived. Thus a language that was regionally important during the colonial era disappeared under pressure from more successful indigenous peoples (Adelaar 2007:326); this appears to have occurred in under half a century (Alarcón 2001:101).
Loukotka (1968) classified Gorgotoqui as a language isolate, but Kaufman (1990) left it unclassified because of a lack of data. From comments that the several languages of the missions "had nothing in common" (Oliva & Pazos 1895:15), we can only conclude that it was not close to any other local language.