Cavineña is an indigenous language spoken on the Amazonian plains of northern Bolivia by over 1,000 Cavineño people. Although Cavineña is still spoken (and still learned by some children), it is an endangered language. Guillaume (2004) 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 (to the south) and Riberalta (to the north).

Phonology

Where the practical orthography is different from IPA, it is shown between angled brackets: 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, or mood affixes: The following examples show the remote past and perfective affixes: 'Me, I was resting with my wife in my mosquito net.' 'You fell from the mango tree.' Aktionsart suffixes include: The following examples show the completive and reiterative suffixes: '(They ran away and) left all their arrows and bags behind.' 'After about ten years or so, the man went hunting again.' Cavineña is the first language in the Amazon for which an antipassive voice has been described. Cavineña has a periodic tense paradigm with four suffixes: diurnal -chinepe, nocturnal -sisa, auroral -wekaka and vesperal -apuna (Guillaume 2008:126), with cognates in the rest of Tacanan. These markers can be redundantly combined with temporal adverbs: meta-tu nei ju-sisa-kware. at.night-3SG rain be-NOCT-REM.PST ‘It rained all night long.’ Among the verbal suffixes, we also find a celerative -wisha encoding quick speed. Iji-wisha-kwe e-na! drink-CELER-IMP:SG DUMMY-water ‘Drink your water quickly (and let’s go)!’ (Guillaume 2008: 202)

Syntax

Nouns and noun phrases

Subtypes of nouns

There are three subtypes of nouns in Cavineña:

Case marking

Case marking on noun phrases is shown through a set of clitic postpositions, including the following: The dative and genitive cases are homophonous. Pronouns (independent or bound) also show these case distinctions. The following example shows several of the case markers in context: 'Me, I was resting with my wife in my mosquito net.' 'You fell from the mango tree.' 'What did you shoot?'

Order in noun phrases

Noun phrases show the order: The following examples show some of these orders. NPF-cooking:pot big=PL 'big cooking pots' all 3PL:GEN bedding=PL RES-burn-LIG 'all their bedding that had burnt' (The clitic =ke 'ligature' appears at the end of a relative clause.)

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: notes that the formative suffix -ke (of singular absolutive bound pronouns) and the ergative suffix -ra (in ergative bound pronouns) 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/: 'The jaguar killed the chicken.' For a sentence with a pronominal subject, there are distinct ergative and absolutive forms of the pronouns: 'I just went.' 'I do not know my father.' 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: 'I will go and bring bananas for them.' 'I am sending a package to my relative.' The clitics are ordered so that 3rd person pronouns precede 2nd person pronouns, which precede 1st person pronouns. (Some of the clitic pronouns in these examples have a formative element /-ke/ after them and some do not.)