Jakaltek language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Jakaltek (or Jacalteco or Popti') are a group of Maya Indians living in the Western Guatemala highlands and adjoining part of Chiapas and southern Mexico.
Jacaltec is also the name of their branch of the Mayan languages which is spoken by approximately 40,000 people, mainly in the Huehuetenango Department of Guatemala. It is known as Pobp’ al Ti’ to native speakers ("Jacaltec" is derived from the Nahuatl name for the people and their language). The Jacaltec language has a Verb Subject Object syntax. Like many Native American languages, Jacaltec has a lot of complex agglutinative morphology and uses ergative-absolutive case alignment. It is divided in two dialects, eastern and western Jacaltec, which are mutually intelligible in speech but not in writing.
Owing to Jacaltec's dissimilarity with Indo-European languages, the reasonably healthy linguistic population and the relative ease of access to Guatemala, Jacaltec has become a favorite of students of linguistic typology.
The Eastern Jacaltec language includes the following phonemes: a, b, c/qu, c'/q'u, ch, ch', e, i, j, k, k', l, m, n, n̈/ŋ, o, p, r, s, t, t', tx, tx', tz, tz', u, w, x, ẍ, y, and '.
Eastern Jacaltec is the only language besides the Malagasy language of Madagascar to make use of an n-diaeresis character in its alphabet. In Jacaltec the n-diaeresis represents a velar nasal consonant (ŋ) (like "ng" in "bang").
