Migueleño Chiquitano
Migueleño Chiquitano
Main page

Migueleño Chiquitano

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Migueleño Chiquitano

Migueleño Chiquitano (self-denomination: ózura [ˈo̞tsuɾḁ], literally 'our speech') is a variety of the Chiquitano language of the Macro-Jê family, which is remembered by several dozen people of the Chiquitano ethnicity in San Miguel de Velasco (Santa Cruz), Bolivia, as well as in neighboring villages.

Migueleño is closely related to other varieties of the Chiquitano language, such as Bésɨro and Eastern Chiquitano. Its most salient phonological features include the occurrence of the voiceless velar fricative /x/ corresponding to the retroflex /ʂ/ of the other dialects and the merger of the palatalized counterparts of /p/ and /k/ as [c̠]. It is also the only variety of Chiquitano in which distinct first person singular prefixes have been documented for the male and female genderlects.

The consonant inventory of Migueleño Chiquitano is shown below (the orthographic representation is given in italics; the characters in slashes stand for the IPA values of each consonant).

The vowel inventory of Migueleño Chiquitano is shown below (the orthographic representation is given in italics; the characters in slashes stand for the IPA values of each vowel).

In Migueleño Chiquitano, male speech is distinct from female speech in exhibiting extra morphological complexity. In particular, the male genderlect distinguishes between three grammatical genders (masculine, non-human animate, and feminine/inanimate), whereas the female genderlect has no grammatical gender distinctions at all (all nouns behave like the feminine/inanimate nouns in the male genderlect).

In addition, the first person singular prefixes are distinct in the male genderlect (underlying form |ij-|) and in the female genderlect (underlying form |ix-|).

Female and male speech further differ in using different suffixes (female -ki, male -che) when deriving content interrogative/relative words.

There are also differences in the choice of the demonstratives.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.