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 The Beni savanna, also known as the Llanos de Moxos or Moxos plains, is a tropical savanna ecoregion of the Beni Department of northern Bolivia. Setting The Beni savanna covers an area of in the lowlands of northern Bolivia, with small portio ...

region of the Bolivian Amazon, in northeastern Bolivia. It is considered a language isolate, 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, Santa Ana del Yacuma.

Phonology

Movima has five

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

s: and more closely resemble and , respectively, than the close-mid vowels 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 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 Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

loanwords.

Morphology

In Movima,

compound Compound may refer to: Architecture and built environments * Compound (enclosure), a cluster of buildings having a shared purpose, usually inside a fence or wall ** Compound (fortification), a version of the above fortified with defensive struc ...

ing and incorporation are productive derivational processes. Reduplication and affixation, including some processes (such as the irrealis marker ''(k)a) that resemble infixation, are also common. Typical examples of

inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...

, such as

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original 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 c ...

, case, tense, mood, and

aspect Aspect or Aspects may refer to: Entertainment * ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art * Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company * Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England * ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...

, 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