Itonama language
| Itonama | |
|---|---|
| sihni pandara | |
| Native to | Bolivia |
| Region | Beni Department |
| Ethnicity | 2,900 Itonama people (2006)[1] |
| Extinct | 2012–2023[1][2] |
| Latin | |
| Official status | |
Official language in |  Bolivia |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ito |
| Glottolog | iton1250 |
| ELP | Itonama |
Itonama (Itonama: sihnipadara[2]) is an 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[3] in Beni Department.
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.[4]: 483
Language contact
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Nambikwaran languages due to contact.[5]
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[6] found lexical similarities between Itonama and Movima, likely due to contact.
Phonology
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | ɨ ⟨ï⟩ | u |
| Mid | e ~ ɛ ⟨e⟩ | o | |
| Low | a ⟨a⟩ |
Diphthongs are /ai au/ ⟨ay aw⟩.
Consonants
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Plosive/ Affricate |
plain | p | t | tʃ ~ ts ⟨ch⟩ | tʲ ⟨ty⟩ | k ⟨k⟩ | ʔ ⟨’⟩ |
| ejective | tʼ | tʃʼ ~ tsʼ ⟨chʼ⟩ | kʼ ⟨kʼ⟩ | ||||
| voiced | b | d | |||||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Liquid | lateral | l | |||||
| rhotic | ɾ ⟨r⟩ | ||||||
| Semivowel | w ~ β ⟨w⟩ | j ⟨y⟩ | |||||
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.[2]
Morphology
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).[7]
Vocabulary
The forms cited here are from the Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS),[8] which takes its data from Camp and Liccardi (1967).
gloss Itonama (IDS) one u-kʼaʔne two -tʃupa tooth oh-womotʼe tongue oh-potʃosnila hand uh-maʔpara woman wabɨʔka water wanuʔwe fire u-bari moon u-ʔtʲahka-ʔkaʔka maize u-tʃuʔu, kanasbɨstʃa house u-ku
See also
- Llanos de Moxos (archaeology)
- Macro-Paesan languages
Further reading
- Camp, E. L.; Liccardi, M. R. (1967). Itonama, castellano e inglés. (Vocabularios Bolivianos, 6.) Riberalta: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
References
- ^ a b Itonama at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025)
- ^ a b c Crevels, Mily (2023-01-30), Epps, Patience; Michael, Lev (eds.), "11 Itonama", Volume 1 Language Isolates I: Aikanã to Kandozi-Shapra: An International Handbook, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 483–546, doi:10.1515/9783110419405-011, ISBN 978-3-11-041940-5, retrieved 2025-10-20
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link) - ^ 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.
- ^ Key, Mary Ritchie (2023). Key, Mary Ritchie; Comrie, Bernard (eds.). "Itonama dictionary". Intercontinental Dictionary Series. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved 2025-10-20.
- Crevels, Mily (2002). "Itonama o Sihnipadara, Lengua no clasificada de la Amazonía Boliviana" (PDF). Estudios de Lingüística (in Spanish). 16.
External links
- Sample of Itonama fragment
- Lenguas de Bolivia Archived 2019-09-04 at the Wayback Machine (online edition)
