Jakaltek language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Poptí, Jakaltek, Jacalteco jab' xub'al |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Guatemala | |
| Region: | Huehuetenango | |
| Total speakers: | approx. 88,800 | |
| Language family: | Mayan Q'anjob'alan-Chujean Q'anjob'alan Poptí Poptí, Jakaltek, Jacalteco |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | — | |
| ISO 639-3: | either: jai — Eastern Poptí jac — Western Poptí |
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| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
The Jakaltek language (also called Poptí) is a Mayan language of Guatemala spoken by around 90,000 Jakaltek people in the department of Huehuetenango and the adjoining part of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The name Poptí for the language is used by the Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala and the Guatemalan Congress.
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").
