Movima language

Movima
Chosineɬ di' mowi:maj
Spoken in	Bolivia
Region	Beni Department
Native speakers	ca. 1400  (date missing)
Language family	language isolate
Official status
Official language in	Bolivia
Regulated by	No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-3	mzp

Movima is a language that is spoken by about 1400 (nearly half) of the Movima, a group of Native Americans that resides in Bolivia. It is considered a language isolate, as it has not been proven 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 epinthetic 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

• Entry for Movima at Rosetta Project
• World Atlas of Language Structures information on Movima