Movima is a language that is spoken by about 1,400 (nearly half) of the Movima, a group of Native Americans that resides in the Llanos de Moxos region of the

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

n Amazon, in northeastern Bolivia. It is considered a

language isolate A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi ...

, as it has not been proven to be related to any other language.

Locations

Movima is spoken in the locations of 18 de Noviembre, 20 de Enero, Bella Flor, Buen Día, Carmen de Iruyañez, Carnavales, Ipimo, Miraflores, Navidad, San Lorenzo, and the town of Santa Ana del Yacuma. The Movima community reported that there are approximately 500 adult speakers as of 2012.

Phonology

Movima has five

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

s: and more closely resemble and , respectively, than the

close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel (also mid-close vowel, high-mid vowel, mid-high vowel or half-close vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned about ...

s and . Vowels have a phonemic length distinction, although some prosodic processes can lengthen otherwise short vowels. Movima does not have tone. The plosive is realized as in the syllable onset but as (which contrasts with the simple nasal phoneme ) in the coda. Similarly, and are realized as and (i.e., as a

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

with a vocalic release), respectively, in the syllable coda. In vowel-initial words and between adjacent vowels, an epenthetic glottal stop appears. The phonemes and are only present in Spanish loanwords.

Morphology

In Movima, compounding and incorporation are productive derivational processes.

Reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...

and

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation' ...

ation, including some processes (such as the irrealis marker ''(k)a) that resemble

infix An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with '' adfix,'' a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix. When marking text for ...

ation, are also common. Typical examples of

inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...

, such as

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

, tense, mood, and aspect, are not obligatorily marked in Movima. Many derivational processes can be applied to a single Movima word. The same morpheme may appear multiple times in one word this way, for instance, ''tikoy-na-poj-na'' "I make X kill Y."

Vocabulary

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items. : Further vocabulary: :

References

External links

World Atlas of Language Structures information on Movima

Lenguas de Bolivia
(online edition)
Movima
( Intercontinental Dictionary Series)
Movima DoReCo corpus
compiled by Katharina Haude. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations. {{DEFAULTSORT:Movima Language Language isolates of South America Languages of Bolivia Mamoré–Guaporé linguistic area