At the height of Chimú conquests, the language was spoken extensively from the Jequetepeque River in the north, to the Carabayllo (near present-day Lima) in the south.

A letter found during excavations at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the El Brujo Archaeological Complex includes a list of decimal numerals which may be Quingnam or Pescadora, but they are not Mochica.

The core Chimú city, Chan Chan, was in the vicinity of the new Spanish city of Trujillo and became overwhelmed by it, with people needing to pick up the language of the conquerors for trade and survival.

Below are numerals from an early 17th-century manuscript found at Magdalena de Cao (Quilter et al. 2010,[2] as transcribed by Urban 2019[3]).

Although the manuscript does not indicate which language the numerals belong to, Quingnam is assumed to be the most likely candidate based on location and other clues:[3] The numerals tau (4), sut (6), canchen (7), and pachac (100) are loanwords from a variety of Quechua II.