Takic

Takic is a proposed grouping of closely related languages in the northern branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, formerly spoken across coastal southern California, the Southern Channel Islands and inland through the Mojave Desert, Coachella Valley and Tehachapi Mountains. Its members included Tongva, Serrano, Cahuilla and Luiseño.

Archaeologists reconstruct a Takic expansion from a desert homeland in the western Mojave: Takic speakers moved south into coastal California thousands of years ago and absorbed or displaced older populations.

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo met coastal Takic speakers in 1542, but sustained contact began after 1769, when Spanish missions such as San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano were founded in their lands. Forced resettlement, epidemics and forced labour shattered the mission peoples, who rose in rebellions such as that led by the prophetess Toypurina in 1785. Mexico's secularization of the missions in the 1830s left most survivors landless.