Itonama is a moribund language isolate spoken by the Itonama people in the Amazonian lowlands of north-eastern

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. Greenberg’s (1987) classification of Itonama as Paezan, a sub-branch of Macro-Chibchan, remains unsupported and Itonama continues to be considered an isolate or unclassified language. It was spoken on the Itonomas River and Lake in Beni Department.

Language contact

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Nambikwaran languages due to contact. An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. found lexical similarities between Itonama and Movima, likely due to contact.

Phonology

Vowels

Diphthongs: .

Consonants

The postalveolar affricates have alveolar allophones . Variation occurs between speakers, and even within the speech of a single person. The semivowel is realized as a bilabial fricative when preceded and followed by identical vowels.

Morphology

Itonama is a polysynthetic, head-marking, verb-initial language with an accusative alignment system along with an inverse subsystem in independent clauses, and straightforward accusative alignment in dependent clauses. Nominal morphology lacks case declension and adpositions and so is simpler than verbal morphology (which has body-part and location incorporation, directionals, evidentials, verbal classifiers, among others).

Vocabulary

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

References

External links

Sample of Itonama fragment

Lenguas de Bolivia
(online edition)
Itonama
( Intercontinental Dictionary Series) {{Jesuit Missions of Moxos Critically endangered languages Language isolates of South America Macro-Paesan languages Languages of Bolivia Mamoré–Guaporé linguistic area