Itonama_language
Itonama language
Moribund language of Bolivia
Itonama is a moribund or extinct language isolate once spoken by the Itonama people in the Amazonian lowlands of north-eastern Bolivia. It was spoken on the Itonomas River and Lake[2] in Beni Department.
| Itonama | |
|---|---|
| sihni pandara | |
| Native to | Bolivia |
| Region | Beni Department |
| Ethnicity | 2,900 (2006)[1] |
Native speakers | 1 (2012)[1] |
| Latin | |
| Official status | |
Official language in |  Bolivia |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ito |
| Glottolog | iton1250 |
| ELP | Itonama |
Itonama is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger | |
| This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. | |
In Magdalena town on the western bank of the Itonama River (a tributary of the Iténez River), located in Iténez Province, only a few elderly people remember a few words and phrases.[3]: 483
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Nambikwaran languages due to contact.[4]
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[5] found lexical similarities between Itonama and Movima, likely due to contact.
Vowels
Diphthongs: /ai au/.
Consonants
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Plosive/ Affricate |
plain | p | t | tʃ | tʲ | k | ʔ |
| ejective | tʼ | tʃʼ | kʼ | ||||
| voiced | b | d | |||||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Liquid | lateral | l | |||||
| rhotic | ɾ | ||||||
| Semivowel | w | j | |||||
The postalveolar affricates /tʃ tʃʼ/ have alveolar allophones [ts tsʼ]. Variation occurs between speakers, and even within the speech of a single person.
The semivowel /w/ is realized as a bilabial fricative [β] when preceded and followed by identical vowels.
Itonama is a polysynthetic, 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).[6]
Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Itonama.[2]
| gloss | Itonama |
|---|---|
| one | chash-káni |
| two | chash-chupa |
| tooth | huomóte |
| tongue | páchosníla |
| hand | mapára |
| woman | ubíka |
| water | huanúhue |
| fire | ubári |
| moon | chakakáshka |
| maize | udáme |
| jaguar | ótgu |
| house | úku |
- Camp, E. L.; Liccardi, M. R. (1967). Itonama, castellano e inglés. (Vocabularios Bolivianos, 6.) Riberalta: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
- Itonama at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center.
- Epps, Patience; Michael, Lev, eds. (2023). Amazonian Languages: Language Isolates. Volume I: Aikanã to Kandozi-Chapra. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-041940-5.
- Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho de Valhery (2016). Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas (Ph.D. dissertation) (2 ed.). Brasília: University of Brasília.
- 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).
- Crevels, M. Who did what to whom in Magdalena. p. 3.
- Crevels, Mily (2002). "Itonama o Sihnipadara, Lengua no clasificada de la Amazonía Boliviana" (PDF). Estudios de Lingüística (in Spanish). 16.
- Sample of Itonama fragment
- Lenguas de Bolivia (online edition)
- Itonama (Intercontinental Dictionary Series)