Itonama is a

moribund Moribund refers to a literal or figurative state near death. Moribund may refer to: * ''Moribund'' (album), a 2006 album by the Norwegian black metal band Koldbrann * " Le Moribond", a song by Jacques Brel known in English as "Seasons in the Sun ...

language isolate Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...

spoken by the

Itonama people The Itonama people are an ethnic group in northeastern Bolivia. They numbered 16,158 in 2012 with 1,249 people speaking the Itonama language Itonama is a moribund language isolate spoken by the Itonama people in the Amazonian lowlands of north ...

in the Amazonian lowlands of north-eastern

Bolivia , image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg , flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center , flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...

. Greenberg’s (1987) classification of Itonama as Paezan, a sub-branch of

Macro-Chibchan Macro-Chibchan is a proposed grouping of the languages of the Lencan, Misumalpan, and Chibchan families into a single large phylum (macrofamily). History The Lencan and Misumalpan languages were once included in the Chibchan family proper, but ...

, remains unsupported and Itonama continues to be considered an isolate or unclassified language. It was spoken on the

Itonomas River The Itonomas River is a river of Bolivia that flows through the departments of Santa Cruz and Beni. It is a part of the Amazon River basin. Course Originating near Concepción Lake at the confluence of the intermittent Quimome and Santa Maria ...

and Lake in

Beni Department Beni (), sometimes El Beni, is a northeastern department of Bolivia, in the lowlands region of the country. It is the second-largest department in the country (after Santa Cruz), covering 213,564 square kilometers (82,458 sq mi), and it was cre ...

Language contact

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the

Nambikwaran languages The Nambikwaran languages are a language family of half a dozen languages, all spoken in the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil. They have traditionally been considered dialects of a single language, but at least three of them are mutually unintelli ...

due to contact. An automated computational analysis (

ASJP The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...

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

Diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...

s: .

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 In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to ...

, 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 The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (commonly abbreviated as IDS) is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An ...

) {{Jesuit Missions of Moxos Critically endangered languages Language isolates of South America Macro-Paesan languages Languages of Bolivia Mamoré–Guaporé linguistic area