Panzaleo is a poorly attested and unclassified indigenous American language

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

 that was spoken in the region of Quito

Quito

San Francisco de Quito, most often called Quito , is the capital city of Ecuador in northwestern South America. It is located in north-central Ecuador in the Guayllabamba river basin, on the eastern slopes of Pichincha, an active stratovolcano in the Andes mountains...

 until the 17th century.

Attestation

Much of the information on Panzaleo comes from toponyms of central and northern Ecuador. Typical are:

-(h)aló: Pilaló, Mulahaló

-leo: Tisaleo, Pelileo

Pelileo

Pelileo is a city located at the center of the Andean region of Ecuador called La Sierra...

-lagua / -ragua: Cutuglagua, Tungurahua

Tungurahua

Tungurahua, , rahua : "Throat of Fire" or from Panzaleo) is an active stratovolcano located in the Cordillera Oriental of Ecuador. The volcano gives its name to the province of Tungurahua...

Classification

Loukotka (1968) suggested that Panzaleo might be related to Paez

Páez language

Páez is a language isolate of Colombia spoken by Páez people in the central Andes region near Popayán...

. (See Paezan languages

Paezan languages

Paezan may be any of several language-family proposals of Colombia and Ecuador named after the Paez language.-Proposed genealogical relations:...

.) One of his sources for this proposal was Jijón y Caamaño (1940), who admit that the evidence is weak and may have been due to language contact

Language contact

Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...

.