Region Bolivia Native speakers 5 (2007) Writing system Latin | Ethnicity 2,900 (2006) Language family Language isolate ISO 639-3 ito | |
Itonama is a moribund language isolate spoken in the Amazonian lowlands of north-eastern Bolivia. Greenberg’s (1987) classification of Itonama as Paezan, a sub-branch of Macro-Chibchan, remains unsupported and Itonama continues to be considered an isolate or unclassified language.
Contents
Vowels
Diphthongs: /ai au/.
Consonants
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.
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).