The Mocoví language is a
Guaicuruan language of
Argentina
Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...
spoken by about 3,000 people, mostly in
Santa Fe,
Chaco, and
Formosa provinces.
In 2010, the province of
Chaco in Argentina declared Mocoví as one of four provincial official languages alongside Spanish and the indigenous
Qom and
Wichí.
Link
The Mataco-Guicurú language family is a group of 11 indigenous languages of the Americas spoken in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, comprising two subfamilies with a total of approximately 100,000 speakers distributed in the Bermejo, Pilcomayo and Paraguay river basins. Other languages of the family are extinct and some others are threatened with extinction.
In the province of Santa Fe, it is used mostly by the elderly Mocoví population. Among adults, bilingualism is widespread and among young people Spanish is preferred. In the province of Chaco, the Mocoví language and culture are carefully preserved.
Writing in the Mocoví language was non-existent until the 1950s, when a group of missionaries developed a Latin alphabet writing system for the Toba language, which was later adapted to Mocoví for the translation of the Bible by Alberto Buckwater. This writing system is still based on correspondence with Spanish orthography, so it contains some of its irregularities.
Phonology
Consonants
The following are the consonants of Mocoví:
Vowels
Gualdieri (1998) gives the following vowels:
Notes
References
*
*
External links
*https://web.archive.org/web/20041211212213/http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/INFOpages/Posters/Argentina/Argentina.pdf
Argentinian Languages Collection of Salvador Bucca at the
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, including audio recordings of stories and word lists in Mocoví.
Mocoví(
Intercontinental Dictionary Series)
* http://mocovilanguage.weebly.com/people-and-culture.html
* https://ri.conicet.gov.ar/handle/11336/13436
*
*
* http://ffyl1.uncu.edu.ar/IMG/pdf/Censabella_y_Messineo_eds_2013.pdf#page=39
Guaicuruan languages
Endangered Guaicuruan languages
Languages of Argentina
Chaco linguistic area
{{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub
Santa Fe, Argentina
Formosa, Argentina