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Yucatec Maya ("Maaya T'aan" in the revised orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala) is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula, northern Belize and parts of Guatemala. To native speakers, it is known only as Maya - "Yucatec" is a tag linguists use to distinguish it from other Mayan languages (such as K'iche' and Itza' Maya). In the Mexican states of Yucatán, northern Campeche and Quintana Roo, Maya remains many speakers' first language today, with approximately 800,000 speakers.
CharacteristicsA characteristic feature of Yucatec Maya (and all Mayan languages) is the use of ejective consonants - /p'/, /k'/, /t'/. Often referred to as glottalized consonants, they are pronounced more or less like their non-ejective counterparts, though the pronunciation is briefly halted and then released with a characteristic popping sound. These sounds are written using an apostrophe after the letter to distinguish them from the plain consonants (e.g., t'áan "speech" vs. táan "chest"). The apostrophes indicating these sounds were not common in written Maya until the 20th century but are now becoming more common. Yucatec Maya is one of only three Mayan languages to have developed tone (the others are Uspantek and one dialect of Tzotzil). It distinguishes between vowels with high and low tones - high tone is usually indicated in writing by an acute accent (á í é ó ú). Also, Yucatec has contrastive laryngealization on vowels, as in the plural suffix -o'ob. Like almost all Mayan languages, Yucatec Maya is verb initial. Word order varies between VOS and VSO with VOS being the most common. Many sentences may appear to be SVO, but this order is due to a topic-comment system similar to that of Japanese. One of the most widely studied areas of Yucatec is the semantics of time in the language. Yucatec, like many other languages of the world (Kalaallisut, arguably Mandarin Chinese, Guaraní inter alia) does not have the grammatical category of tense. Temporal information is encoded by a combination of aspect, inherent lexical aspect (aktionsart), and pragmatically governed conversational inferences. Yucatec is further unique in the world's languages for lacking temporal connective such as 'before' and 'after'. Another unique aspect of the language is the core argument marking strategy which is a 'fluid S system' in the typology of Dixon (1994)[1] where intransitive subjects are encoded like agents or patients based upon a number of semantics properties as well as the perfectivity of the event. OrthographyThe Maya were literate in pre-Columbian times, when the language was written using Maya hieroglyphs. The language itself can be traced back to proto-Yucatecan, the ancestor of modern Yucatec Maya, Itza, Lacandon and Mopan. Even further back, the language is ultimately related to all other Maya languages through proto-Mayan itself. Yucatec Maya is now written in the Latin script. This was introduced during the Spanish Conquest of Yucatán which began in the early 16th century, and the now-antiquated conventions of Spanish orthography of that period ("Colonial orthography") were adapted to transcribe Yucatec Maya. This included the use of x for the postalveolar fricative sound (often spelled as sh in English), a sound that in Spanish has since turned into a velar fricative nowadays spelled j, except in a few geographic names such as "México". In colonial times a "reversed c" (ɔ) was often used for the [ʦ’] sound now more usually written dz (and latterly as tz' in the revised ALMG orthography). Common Phrases in MayaBix a bel? (pronounced "B'ix a b'eh?" in parts of western Yucatán and northern Campeche)
Ma'alob, kux tech?
Bey xan ten.
Tux ka bin?
Tim b'in xíimbal.
Bix a k'àab'a'?
" In k'aaba' Jorge.
Hach ki'imak in wóol in wilikech
Ba'ax ka wa'alik?
Mix bá'al. (Pronounced "Mix b'á'ah" in parts of western Yucatán and northern Campeche)
Bix a wilik?
Jach Ma'alob'
Kó'ox!
Kó'one'ex!
Ba'ax a ka?
Tak sáamal (the word "tak" is often lost in many areas of the northern lowlands, and it is replaced with "hasta sáamah" in western Yucatán and northern Campeche)
Hach dyos bo'otik.
Mix bá'al. (Pronounced "Mix b'á'ah" in parts of western Yucatán and northern Campeche)
English word derived from MayaAccording to Breaking the Maya Code: Revised Edition by Michael D. Coe, 1999, the English word "shark" comes directly from the Maya xoc for "fish". The OED print edition describes the origin of shark as "uncertain", noting that it "seems to have been introduced by the sailors of Captain (afterwards Sir John) Hawkins's expedition, who brought home a specimen which was exhibited in London in 1569". Use in modern-day media and popular cultureYucatec-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio stations XEXPUJ-AM (Xpujil, Campeche), XENKA-AM (Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo) and XEPET-AM (Peto, Yucatán). The 2006 film Apocalypto, directed by Mel Gibson, was filmed entirely in Yucatec Maya, the script was translated into Maya by Hilario Chi Canul of the Maya community of Felipe Carrillo Puerto who also worked as a language coach on the production. Notes
References
Language coursesIn addition to universities and private institutions in Mexico, (Yucatec) Maya is also taught at:
Audio course materials are available for purchase at
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