The MocovÃÂ language is a Guaicuruan language of Argentina spoken by about 3,000 people, mostly in Santa Fe, Chaco, and Formosa provinces.
In 2010, the province of Chaco in Argentina declared MocovÃÂ as one of four provincial official languages alongside Spanish and the indigenous Qom and WichÃÂ.
The Mataco-Guicurú language family is a group of 11 indigenous languages of the Americas spoken in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, comprising two subfamilies with a total of approximately 100,000 speakers distributed in the Bermejo, Pilcomayo and Paraguay river basins. Other languages of the family are extinct and some others are threatened with extinction.
In the province of Santa Fe, it is used mostly by the elderly MocovÃÂ population. Among adults, bilingualism is widespread and among young people Spanish is preferred. In the province of Chaco, the MocovÃÂ language and culture are carefully preserved.
The following are the consonants of MocovÃÂ:
Gualdieri (1998) gives the following vowels:
Writing in the MocovÃÂ language was non-existent until the 1950s, when a group of missionaries developed a Latin alphabet writing system for the Toba language, which was later adapted to MocovÃÂ for the translation of the Bible by Alberto Buckwater. This writing system is still based on correspondence with Spanish orthography, so it contains some of its irregularities.