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.

Movima
Chosineɬ di' mowi:maj [1]
Native to	Bolivia
Region	Beni Department
Ethnicity	Movima people
Native speakers	1,000 (2012)[2]
Language family	Language isolate
Official status
Official language in	Bolivia[3]
Language codes
ISO 639-3	mzp
Glottolog	movi1243
ELP	Movima
Map of indigenous groups in Bolivia, with Movima in light green
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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, and the town of Santa Ana del Yacuma.^[2] The Movima community reported that there are approximately 500 adult speakers as of 2012.^[4]: 807

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.^[5]

The consonants of Movima

		Labial	Alveolar		Palatal	Velar		Glottal
			central	lateral		plain	lab.
Nasal		m	n
Stop	pulmonic	p	t		tʃ	k (ɡ)	kʷ	(ʔ)
	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.^[1] 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.^[1] 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.^[6]

gloss	Movima
one	sotaru
two	oira
three	taxra
tooth	söichlan
tongue	rulkua
hand	chopa
woman	kukya
water	tomi
fire	vé
moon	yekcho
maize	kuaxta
jaguar	rulrul
house	roya

Further vocabulary:

gloss	Movima
to sit	as
to stand	en
to come	jiwa
dust	vuskwa
Movima	mowi:maj
language	chonsineɬ
of	di'

See also

• Llanos de Moxos (archaeology)

Further reading

• Judy, R. A.; Judy, J. (1962). Movima y castellano. (Vocabularios Bolivianos, 1). Vocabularios Bolivianos. Cochabamba: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

References

1. Katharina Haude (2006). "A grammar of Movima" (PDF). Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Retrieved 2008-10-22.
2. Movima at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
3. "Constitution of Bolivia, Article 5. I." (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-05-21.
4. Epps, Patience; Michael, Lev, eds. (2023). Amazonian Languages: Language Isolates. Volume II: Kanoé to Yurakaré. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-043273-2.
5. "WALS – Movima". World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
6. Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center.

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.