Movima language

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 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.

Phonology

Movima has five vowels:

The vowels of Movima

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

/e/ and /o/ more closely resemble [ɛ] and [ɔ], respectively, than the close-mid vowels [e] and [o]. Vowels have a phonemic length distinction, although some prosodic processes can lengthen otherwise short vowels. Movima does not have tone.

The consonants of Movima

		Labial	Alveolar		Palatal	Velar		Glottal
			central	lateral		plain	lab.
Nasal		m	n
Stop	pulmonic	p	t		tʃ	k (ɡ)	kʷ
	implosive	ɓ	ɗ
Fricative		(f) β	s	ɬ				h
Approximant				l	j	w		jˀ
Trill			r

The plosive /p/ is realized as [p] in the syllable onset but as [pʔᵐ] (which contrasts with the simple nasal phoneme /m/) in the coda. Similarly, /t/ and /k/ are realized as [tʔⁿ] and [ʔ^ɤ] (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 /f/ and /ɡ/ are only present in Spanish loanwords.

Morphology

In Movima, compounding 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, such as number, case, tense, mood, and aspect, 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."

External links

• World Atlas of Language Structures information on Movima
• Lenguas de Bolivia (online edition)