Calima

Calima is the name scholars give to the unattested speech of the pre-Columbian societies of the Calima River valley, in the Western Cordillera of the Colombian department of Valle del Cauca. No word of the valley's languages was ever written down, so their classification is unknown.

The farming Ilama chiefdoms arose around 1500 BCE, the Yotoco culture flourished from the first century CE and gave way after the sixth century to the more centralized Sonso chiefdoms, which still occupied the valley in 1337 and lasted into the 1500s.

Colonial-era accounts link the region's peoples to the Cariban-speaking Panche of the Magdalena slope, but this rests on chronicler report rather than linguistic evidence. Spanish conquest of the Cauca valley in the sixteenth century dissolved the Sonso chiefdoms, and the old tongues disappeared under the spread of Spanish.