La enseñanza de la lengua mochica a partir de sus fuentes

In recent years, the teaching of the Mochica language has been steadily consolidated in cultural centers and schools in Lambayeque and La Libertad, regions of northern Peru. The growing interest in studying the language reflects a revaluation of the pre-Hispanic past, which serves as a foundation for strengthening a collective identity that recognizes itself as Muchik. In this way, the construction of Muchik identity is not only based on the preservation of traditions and the appreciation of archaeological heritage but also on learning the ancestral language.

Currently, dramatized representations of Muchik warriors and maidens have become common, and mastery of the ancestors' language is often required for these performances. This growing need to learn and recover the language of the ancestors has motivated the publication of learning manuals. While their authors have drawn inspiration from historical sources on Mochica, they chose to combine different orthographic solutions and implement innovative grammatical adaptations. However, as we will see later, the grammatical structure of historical Mochica does not formally align with that of contemporary Muchik. The notable differences in writing, morphosyntax, and vocabulary between Mochica as spoken until the early 20th century and the Muchik found in the manuals published in the 21st century have led recent academic studies to refer to the latter as Neo-Mochica (Eloranta, 2020a; Eloranta & Bartens, 2020).

In this article, we establish a distinction between Mochica and Muchik by treating them as two separate linguistic entities. Thus, we refer to Mochica as the ancestral language spoken until the early 20th century, and we use Muchik to refer both to the language currently taught in cultural centers and schools in Lambayeque and La Libertad, as well as to the cultural recovery movement aimed at constructing a regional collective identity in northern Peru (Asensio, 2012, p. 36).

Our objective is to highlight the importance of studying and teaching Mochica grammar from a historical perspective, using Arte de la lengua yunga de los valles del Obispado de Truxillo del Perú by Fernando de la Carrera (1644) as a basis, as it is still considered the most comprehensive description of Mochica. Thus, in Section 2, we present some historical and grammatical aspects of Mochica; in Section 3, we provide an overview of the last two decades of Muchik teaching and highlight some of its most notable linguistic features in relation to Mochica; and in Section 4, we reflect on our proposed approach to teaching the language.