Yukatek Maya language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Yukatek Maya Maaya t'aan |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Mexico, Belize | |
| Region: | Yucatan 547,098, Quintana Roo 163,477, Campeche 75,847, Belize 5,000 |
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| Total speakers: | 805,000 | |
| Language family: | Mayan Yucatecan Yucatec-Lacandon Yukatek Maya |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | myn | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | yua | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Yukatek Maya (in the revised orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas, now preferred by scholars; also frequently Yucatec) is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula, northern Belize and parts of Guatemala. To native speakers, it is known only as Maya - Yukatek is a tag linguists use to distinguish it from other Mayan languages (such as K'iche' and Itza' Maya).
Yukatek Maya is written in the Latin script. This was introduced during the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan and the old Spanish orthography of that time was used (which included the use of "x" for the postalveolar fricative sound spelled "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" was often used for the sound now more usually written "dz" (/tz'/ in the revised orthography, see below). The Maya were literate in pre-Columbian times, when the language was written using Maya hieroglyphs. The language itself can be traced back to proto-Yukatekan, the ancestor of modern Yukatek, Itza, Lacandon and Mopan. Even further back, the language is ultimately related to all other Maya languages through proto-Mayan itself.
A distinctive feature of Yukatek (and all Mayan languages) is the use of ejective consonants - /p'/, /k'/, /t'/. Often (but incorrectly) 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.
Yukatek is an agglutinative language, so words can end up seeming quite long (e.g., kuhatz'ikech He hits you, tuhatz'ahech He hit you). There are a great number of root words, prefixes, suffixes and affixes in Yukatek Mayan.
Like all Mayan languages, Yukatek has Verb Subject Object word order and ergative morphosyntactic alignment. That said, the obligatorily-bound pronouns on Yukatek verbs (see above) is canonically Subject Object Verb in order.
In the Mexican states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo, Yukatek remains many speakers' first language today. In addition to universities and private institutions in Mexico, the Yukatek language is also taught in the U.S. at Harvard University, Tulane and The University of North Carolina
[edit] Contemporary cultural references to Yukatek
- The film Apocalypto (released December 2006, directed by Mel Gibson) was filmed in Yukatek.
- The film Chac: Dios de la lluvia (released in 1975) is filmed partly in Yukatec, partly in the Tzotzil Maya language.
