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

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 ...

n Amazon, in northeastern Bolivia. It is considered a

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 ...

, 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 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 one th ...

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

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 Incorporation may refer to: * Incorporation (business), the creation of a corporation * Incorporation of a place, creation of municipal corporation such as a city or county * Incorporation (academic), awarding a degree based on the student having ...

are productive derivational processes.

Reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...

and

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...

ation, including some processes (such as the

irrealis In linguistics, irrealis moods (abbreviated ) are the main set of grammatical moods that indicate that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. This contrasts with the realis moods. Every ...

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 int ...

ation, 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 defin ...

, 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 Case or CASE may refer to: Containers * Case (goods), a package of related merchandise * Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component * Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books * Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to c ...

, 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 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 ...

)
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