Cavineña is an indigenous language spoken on the Amazonian plains of northern Bolivia by over 1,000 Cavineño people. Although Cavineña is still spoken, it is an endangered language. Guillaume states that about 1200 people speak the language, out of a population of around 1700. Nearly all Cavineña are bilingual in Spanish. The Cavineño people live in several communities near the Beni River, which flows north from the Andes. The nearest towns are Reyes and Riberalta.
Phonology
Cavineña has the following consonants. Where the practical orthography is different from IPA, it is shown between angled brackets:
Labial
Alveolar
Palatal
Velar
Labiovelar
Glottal
Nasal
m
n
ɲ
voiceless stop
p
t
c
k
kʷ
voiced stop
b
d
ɟ
Affricate
ts
t͡ɕ
voiceless fricative
s
ɕ
h
Lateral
ɺ
ʎ
Approximant
j
w
It has the following vowels
Front
Central
Back
High
i
ʊ
Mid
e/ɛ
Low
a
Examples in the morphology and syntax sections are written in the practical orthography.
Morphology
Verbs
Verbs do not show agreement with their arguments, but are inflected for tense, aspect, mood, negation, and aktionsart, among other categories. There are six tense/aspect/mood affixes :
-ya 'imperfective'
-wa 'perfective'
-chine 'recent past'
-kware 'remote past'
-buke 'remote future'
e-...-u 'potential'
The following examples show the remote past and perfective affixes: Aktionsart suffixes include:
-tere/tirya 'completive'
-bisha 'incompletive'
-nuka 'repeated/reiterative'
The following examples show the completive and reiterative suffixes: This is the only language in the Amazon that has an antipassive voice.
Case marking on noun phrases is shown through a set of clitic postpositions, including the following:
=ra 'ergative case'
=tsewe 'associative case'
=ja 'dative case'
=ja 'genitive case'
=ju 'locative case'
The dative and genitive cases are homophonous. Pronouns also show these case distinctions. The following example shows several of the case markers in context:
Order in noun phrases
Noun phrases show the order ---Noun---. The following examples show some of these orders.
Pronouns
Pronouns in Cavineña can appear in either independent or bound forms. The two kinds of pronouns are pronounced almost exactly the same, but the bound pronouns appear in second position, after the first word of the sentence. Independent pronouns tend to be contrastive, and usually appear first in the sentence. The following pronouns are found: Guillaume notes that the formative suffix -ke and the ergative suffix -ra do not show up when absolutive or ergative pronouns occur last among the second position clitics.
Sentences
Cavineña has ergative case marking on the subject of a transitive verb. For sentences with a non-pronominal subject, this is shown with an ergative case clitic /=ra/: For a sentence with a pronominal subject, there are distinct ergative and absolutive forms of the pronouns: Verbs do not inflect for the person of the subject or other arguments in the clause. Instead, a set of clitic pronouns occurs in the second position of the clause, as in the following examples : The clitics are ordered so that 3rd person pronouns precede 2nd person pronouns, which precede 1st person pronouns.
