[citation needed] Miskito is as widely spoken in Honduras and Nicaragua as Spanish, it is also an official language in the Atlantic region of these countries.
Miskito is not only spoken in Central America, but in Europe (United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, France and Italy), the USA, Canada and in many other Latin American countries.
A (a), B (be), C (ce), D (de), E (e), F (ef), G (ge), H (ha), I (i), J (jei), K (ka), L (el), M (em), N (en), O (o), P (pi), Q (ku), R (ar), S (es), T (te), U (yoo), V (vee), W (dubilu), X (eks), Y (yei), Z (zet).
Examples of monosyllabic words: Within words of more than one syllable interior clusters may therefore contain more than two consonants (rarely more than three), but in such cases there is generally a morpheme boundary involved: Simplification of underlying consonant clusters in verb forms takes place, with stem consonants disappearing when certain suffixes are added to verb stems of certain phonological shapes: The demonstratives naha, baha, naura, bukra and the interrogative determiners ani and dia precede the noun they determine and require the ligature (see below).
Optionally the article may be combined with other determiners or quantifiers, and with the ligature (which seems to convey a greater degree of definiteness).
This and other postpositions are placed after the last element in a noun phrase, e.g. (see above) wina 'from' Relationals are quasi-nouns expressing some relationship (often spatial) to their possessor complement.
The stem of many such verbs (obtained by subtracting the infinitive ending) are monosyllabic (bal-, dim-, tak-, dauk-, kaik-, bri-, wi-, pi- etc.
Finite forms include several tenses and moods, in each of which the person (but not number) of the subject is marked by suffixes.
The subject markers vary somewhat according to the tense, but the most usual forms are shown in the following table (see below for more details).
Verbs whose stems end in i (bri- 'have', wi- 'tell', pi- 'eat', di- 'drink', swi- 'allow') vary from the above paradigm in a few minor points.
Connected to a following verb in a past or present tense within a switch reference chain, it functions as the different-subject participle (see below).
The negative participle can be followed by a finite form of kaia to express any person-tense combination; alternatively these categories may be left implicit by omitting the auxiliary.
Note: Given the differences in terminology, the following comparative table for names of non-finite forms used in this article, Salamanca's Miskito school grammar and Green's Lexicographic Study of Ulwa (a related language with similar categories) may be found useful: The range of aspectual, modal and other notions that can be expressed is enlarged considerably by the availability of various periphrastic constructions in which a verb acting as auxiliary is placed after the main verb.
The conjugated component can take a variety of tenses, including periphrastic ones, and the periphrases themselves may often be combined; thus chains of several auxiliaries are possible.
Another type of construction consists of a conjugated main verb followed by a third-person form of kaia.
By compounding the past perfect construction again with sa, and then kaka for 'if' (itself really a form of kaia), we obtain an unfulfilled hypothetical clause.
Demonstrative and interrogative determiners, the possessive proclitics ai and wan, and certain adjectives, precede the noun, which takes the ligature in these cases.
While no systematic case marking differentiates formally between subjects and objects, there exist (apart from word order) certain option for achieving disambiguation.
Sika may be placed after a definite noun phrase to foreground it; its effect is similar to that of focus clefting in English.
There is also a valency-decreasing verb-prefix ai- which, added to transitive stems, produces unergative, reflexive, reciprocal or middle verbs.
'Nothing', 'nobody' and so on are expressed using indefinite words, generally accompanied by sin 'also, even', usually in combination with negative verb forms.
With or without ki, in wh-questions the interrogative element either stands at the beginning of the question... ...or immediately precedes the verb.
In the 'headless' counterpart of the internal construction, the place of the head within the relative clause is occupied by an interrogative pronoun.
A complement clause may bear no subordination marker but merely be followed by the article ba functioning in practice as a nominalizer.
Sometimes the article ba precedes the conjunction, which may take the form of a preposition... a relational... or a noun.
As regards origin, the Miskito lexicon consists of the following principal components: Some derivational affixes: Miskito has a large number of light-verb constructions or compound verbs which consist of two words but express meanings that are lexically determined for the construction as a whole, e.g. A similar construction is used in verbs that are loans from English: the borrowed lexeme is an invariable element (help, wark, want...) followed by a Miskito verb, e.g. Nominal compounds are much less common.
Inflectional and derivational morphology are of moderate complexity and predominantly suffixing, together with the use of infixes in the nominal paradigm.
The ligature morpheme generally occurs on the noun whenever this is preceded by one of the items mentioned, and also when it takes a possessive index.
If a transitive verb has both a patient and a recipient, the latter is not indexed and appears as a postpositional phrase (indirect object).
The expression of nominal possessive or genitive relations is similarly head-marking: the head (i.e. the possessed) is marked with indices indicating the person of the dependent (the possessor), the noun phrase expressing which is either omitted normally if pronominal (a pro-drop phenomenon) or precedes the head, e.g. arask-i 'my horse' (or yang arask-i), araska 'his horse' (zero-marked possessor), Juan araska 'Juan's horse' (cf.