Yucatec Maya language

Yucatec
Maya
maya' t'àan
Native to	Mexico, Belize
Region	Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Campeche, northern Belize
Native speakers	792,113 (2010 census)
Language family	Mayan Yucatecan Yucatec–Lacandon Yucatec
Official status
Official language in	Mexico
Regulated by	INALI
Language codes
ISO 639-3	yua
Glottolog	yuca1254

Yucatec Maya (endonym: Maya; Yukatek Maya in the revised orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala), called maya' t'àan (Mayan pronunciation: [majaʔˈtʼàːn], lit. "Maya speech") by its speakers, is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. To native speakers, the proper name is Maya and it is known only as Maya. The qualifier "Yucatec" is a tag linguists use to distinguish it from other Mayan languages (such as K'iche' and Itza'). Thus the use of the term Yucatec Maya to refer to the language is scientific jargon or nomenclature.

In the Mexican states of Yucatán, some parts of Campeche, Tabasco, Chiapas, and Quintana Roo, Maya remains many speakers' first language today, with 800,000 speakers. There are 6,000 speakers in Belize.

History

Yucatán Peninsula

Yucatec Maya forms part of the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan language family. The Yucatecan branch divides into the subgroups Mopan-itza and Yucatec-Lacandon, which in turn split into four languages: Itza, Mopan, Yucatec Maya, and Lacandon. All the languages in the Mayan language family are thought to originate from an ancestral language that was spoken some 5,000 years ago, known as Proto-Mayan.

Christopher Columbus traded with Maya merchants off the coast of Yucatán in 1502, but never made landfall. Arriving in Yucatán during the decade following Columbus' first contact with the Maya, the first Spanish to set foot on Yucatán soil did so by chance, the survivors of a shipwreck in the Caribbean. Most of the shipwrecked men were sacrificed, leaving just two survivors. In 1519, one of these men (Gerónimo de Aguilar) accompanied Hernán Cortez to the Yucatán island of Cozumel, also taking part in the conquest of central Mexico. The other survivor (Gonzalo Guerrero) became a Mexican legend as father of the first Mestizo: by Aguilar’s account, Guerrero "went native"- he married native women, wore traditional native apparel, and even fought against the Spanish. Francisco de Montejo's military incursion of Yucatán took three generations and three wars of heavy fighting that lasted a total of 24 years.The Maya had been in a stable decline when Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1517 AD. From 200 to 800 AD the Maya were thriving and making great technological advances and created a system for recording numerals and hieroglyphs that was more complex and efficient than what had come before. They migrated Northward and Eastward to the Yucatán peninsula from Palenque, Jaina, and Bonampak. In the 12th and 13th centuries, a coalition emerged in the Yucatán peninsula between three important centers, Uxmal, Chichen Uitza, and Mayapan, where they were able to grow and practice intellectual and artistic achievement during a period of peace, but then war broke out and both intellectual and artistic achievements came to end. By the 15th century Mayan Toltec fell. In the 18th century the Spanish turned the lands to large maize and cattle plantations with luxurious haciendas and exported natural resources. The Maya were subjects of the Spanish Empire from 1542 to 1821.

Language tree

During the colonization of the Yucatán peninsula, the Spanish believed that in order to evangelize and govern the Maya they needed to reform Yucatec Maya and shape it to serve their ends of religious conversion and social control. Spanish missionaries undertook a project of linguistic and social transformation known as reducción (from Spanish reducir), a term not widely recognized by historians. The linguistic aspect of this process involved the reformulation of Yucatec Maya, primarily through the translation of religious texts from Spanish into Yucatec Maya and the creation of neologisms needed to express Catholic religious concepts. The result of the process of reducción was Maya reducido, a semantically transformed version of Yucatec Maya. Along with the attempted eradication of all Maya religious practices and associated written works, the missionaries thus shaped a language that was used to convert, subjugate, and govern the Maya population of the Yucatán peninsula. Notwithstanding, Maya reducido was appropriated by its Maya speakers for their own purposes and served efforts to resist colonial domination. The oldest written records in Maya reducido (which used the Roman alphabet) were written by Maya notaries between 1557 and 1851. These works can be found in the United States, Mexico, and Spain in libraries and archives

Phonology

A characteristic feature of Yucatec Maya, like other Mayan languages, is the use of ejective consonants: /pʼ/, /tʼ/, /kʼ/. Often referred to as glottalized consonants, they are produced at the same place of oral articulation as their non-ejective stop counterparts: /p/, /t/, /k/. However, the release of the lingual closure is preceded by a raising of the closed glottis to increase the air pressure in the space between the glottis and the point of closure, resulting in a release with a characteristic popping sound. The sounds are written using an apostrophe after the letter to distinguish them from the plain consonants (t'àan "speech" vs. táan "forehead"). The apostrophes indicating the sounds were not common in written Maya until the 20th century but are now becoming more common. The Mayan b is also glottalized, an implosive /ɓ/, and is sometimes written b', but that is becoming less common.

Yucatec Maya is one of only three Mayan languages to have developed tone, the others being Uspantek and one dialect of Tzotzil. Yucatec distinguishes short vowels and long vowels, indicated by single versus double letters (ii ee aa oo uu), and between high- and low-tone long vowels. High-tone vowels begin on a high pitch and fall in phrase-final position but rise elsewhere, sometimes without much vowel length. It is indicated in writing by an acute accent (íi ée áa óo úu). Low-tone vowels begin on a low pitch and are sustained in length; they are sometimes indicated in writing by a grave accent (ìi èe àa òo ùu).

Also, Yucatec has contrastive laryngealization (creaky voice) on long vowels, sometimes realized by means of a full intervocalic glottal stop and written as a long vowel with an apostrophe in the middle, as in the plural suffix -o'ob.

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m [m]	n [n]
Implosive		b [ɓ]
Plosive	aspirated	p [pʰ]	t [tʰ]		k [kʰ]	' [ʔ]
	ejective	p' [pʼ]	t' [tʼ]		k' [kʼ]
Affricate	aspirated		tz [tsʰ]	ch [tʃʰ]
	ejective		tz' [tsʼ]	ch' [tʃʼ]
Fricative			s [s]	x [ʃ]	j [x]	h [h]
Approximant		w [w~v]†	l [l]	y [j]
Flap			r [ɾ]

† the letter w may represent the sounds [w] or [v]. The sounds are interchangeable in Yucatec Mayan although /w/ is considered the proper sound.

Vowels

In terms of vowel quality, Yucatec Maya has a straight-forward five vowel system:

	Front	Back
Close	i	u
Mid	e	o
Open	a

For each of these five vowel qualities, the language contrasts four distinct vowel "shapes", i.e. combinations of length, tone, and phonation type. In the standard orthography first adopted in 1984, vowel length is indicated by digraphs (e.g. "aa" for IPA [aː])

Short, no/low tone	Long, low tone	Long, high tone	Creaky voice ('rearticulated')
pik 'eight thousand' [pik]	miis 'cat' [mìːs]	míis [míːs] 'broom, sweep'	tz'o'ok [tsʼo̰ːk] 'end'

Stress

Mayan words are typically stressed on the last syllable, but borrowings from other languages such as Spanish or Nahuatl are often stressed elsewhere.

Acquisition

Phonology acquisition is received idiosyncratically. If a child seems to have severe difficulties with affricates and sibilants, another might have no difficulties with them while having significant problems with sensitivity to semantic content, unlike the former child.

There seems to be no incremental development in phonology patterns. Monolingual children learning the language have shown acquisition of aspiration and deobstruentization but difficulty with sibilants and affricates, and other children show the reverse. Also, some children have been observed fronting palatoalveolars, others retract lamino-alveolars, and still others retract both.

Glottalization was not found to be any more difficult than aspiration. That is significant with Yucatec Mayan languages' use of ejectives. Glottal constriction is high in the developmental hierarchy, and features like [fricative], [apical], or [fortis] are found to be later acquired.

Grammar

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 and others) 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 unusual in lacking temporal connectives such as 'before' and 'after'. Another aspect of the language is the core-argument marking strategy, which is a 'fluid S system' in the typology of Dixon (1994) where intransitive subjects are encoded like agents or patients based upon a number of semantic properties as well as the perfectivity of the event.

Verb paradigm

Class Ia: Transitive verbs of action or state ('het', to open [something])

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) het-ik "I am opening something"
Past	Simple	tin (t-in) het-ah "I opened something"
	Recent	tz'in (tz'on-in) het-ah "I have just opened something"
	Distant	in het-m-ah "I opened something a long time ago"
Future	Simple	hēn (he-in) het-ik-e "I shall open something"
	Possible	kin (ki-in) het-ik "I may open something"
	Going-to future	bin in het-e "I am going to open something"
Imperative		het-e "Open it!

Class Ia: Intransitive verbs of action or state ('het', to open)

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) het-el or het-el-in-kah (het-l-in-kah) "I am performing the act of opening"
Past	Simple	het-en or t'-het-en "I opened"
	Recent	tz'in het-el "I have just opened"
Future	Simple	hēn (he-in) het-el-e "I shall open"
	Going-to future	ben-het-ăk-en "I am going to open"
Imperative		het-en "Open!"

Class Ia: Passive verbs of action or state ('het', to be opened)

Phase		Example
Present		tun (tan-u) het-s-el "it is being opened"
Past		het-s-ah-b-i or het-s-ah-n-i "it was opened"
Future		hu (he-u) het-s-el-e or bin het-s-ăk-i "it will be opened"

Class Ib: Transitive verbs of action or state with causal ('kim', to kill [something])

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) kim-s-ik "I am killing something"
Past	Simple	tin (t-in) kim-s-ah "I killed something"
	Recent	tz'in (tz'on-in) kim-s-ah "I have just [killed] something"
	Distant	in kim-s-m-ah "I killed something a long time ago"
Future	Simple	hēn (he-in) kim-s-ik-e "I shall kill something"
	Possible	kin (ki-in) kim-s-ik "I may kill something"
	Going-to future	bin in kim-s-e "I am going to kill something"
Imperative		kim-s-e "Kill it!

Class Ia: Intransitive verbs of action or state with causal ('kim', to die)

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) kim-il or kim-il-in-kah "I am dying"
Past	Simple	kim-i or t'-kim-i "He died"
	Recent	tz'u kim-i "He has just died"
Future	Simple	hēn (he-in) kim-il-e "I shall die"
	Going-to future	bin-kim-ăk-en "I am going to die"
Imperative		kim-en "Die!"

Class Ia: Passive verbs of action or state ('kim', to be killed)

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) kim-s-il "I am being killed"
Past		kim-s-ah-b-i or kim-s-ah-n-i "he was killed"
Future		hēn (he-in) kim-s-il-e or bin kim-s-ăk-en "I shall be killed"

Class II: Verbs in t-al, "endowed with" ('kux', to live)

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) kux-t-al "I am living"
Past		kux-t-al-ah-en or kux-l-ah-en "I lived"
Future	Simple	hēn (he-in) kux-t-al-e "I shall be living"
	Going-to future	bin kux-tal-ăk-en "I am going to live"
Imperative		kux-t-en or kux-t-al-en "Live!"

Class IIIa: Transitive nominal verbs ('tz'on', gun)

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) tz'on-ik "I am shooting something"
Past	Simple	tin (t-in) tz'on-ah "I shot something"
	Recent	tz'in (tz'ok-in) tz'on-ah "I have just shot something"
	Distant	in tz'on-m-ah "I shot something a long time ago"
Future	Simple	hēn (he-in) tz'on-ik-e "I shall shoot something"
	Possible	kin (ki-in) tz'on-ik "I may shoot something"
	Going-to future	bin in tz'on-e "I am going to shoot something"
Imperative		tz'on-e "Shoot it!

Class IIIa: Intransitive nominal verbs ('tz'on', gun)

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) tz'on "I am shooting"
Past	Simple	tz'on-n-ah-en "I shot"
	Recent	tz'in (tz'ok-in) tz'on "I have just shot"
	Distant	tz'on-n-ah-ah-en "I shot a long time ago"
Future	Simple	hēn (he-in) tz'on-e "I shall shoot"
	Going-to future	bin-tz'on-ăk-en "I am going to shoot"
Imperative		tz'on-en "Shoot!"

Class IIIa: Passive nominal verbs ('tz'on', gun)

Phase		Example
Present		tin (tan-in) tz'on-ol "I am being shot"
Past		tz'on-ah-b-en or tz'on-ah-n-en "I was shot"
Future		hēn (he-in) tz'on-ol-e "I shall be shot"

Orthography

The Maya were literate in pre-Columbian times, when the language was written using Maya script. 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 (which is often written in English as sh), a sound that in Spanish has since turned into a velar fricative nowadays spelled j.

In colonial times a "reversed c" (ɔ) was often used to represent [tsʼ], which is now more usually represented with ⟨dz⟩ (and with ⟨tz'⟩ in the revised ALMG orthography).

Examples

Yucatec Maya		English
Standard pronunciation	Pronunciation of western Yucatán, northern Campeche and Central Quintana Roo	Normal translation	Literal translation
Bix a beel?	Bix a beh?	How are you?	How is your road?
Ma'alob, kux teech?		Good, and you?	Not bad, as for you?
Bey xan teen.		Same with me.	Thus also to me.
Tu'ux ka bin?		Where are you going?	Where do you go?
T(áan) in bin xíimbal.		I am going for a walk.
Bix a k'aaba'?		What is your name?	How are you named?
In k'aaba'e' Jorge.		My name is Jorge.	My name, Jorge.
Jach ki'imak in wóol in wilikech.		Pleased to meet you.	Very happy my heart to see you.
Ba'ax ka wa'alik?		What's up?	What (are) you saying? What do you say?
Mix ba'al.	Mix ba'ah.	Nothing. Don't mention it.	No thing.
Bix a wilik?		How does it look?	How you see (it)?
Jach ma'alob.		Very good.	Very not-bad
Ko'ox!		Let's go! (For two people - you and I)
Ko'one'ex!		Let's go! (For a group of people)
Ba'ax a k'áat?		What do you want?
(Tak) sáamal.	Aasta sáamah.	See you tomorrow.	Until tomorrow.
Jach Dyos bo'otik.		Thank you. God bless you very much.	Very much God pays (it).
Uacax		Cow

Use in modern media and popular culture

Yucatec-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.

In the video game Civilization V: Gods & Kings, Pacal, leader of the Maya, speaks in Yucatec Maya.

In August 2012, the Mozilla Translathon 2012 event brought over 20 Yucatec Mayan speakers together in a localization effort for the Google Endangered Languages Project, the Mozilla browser, and the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Baktun, the "first ever Mayan telenovela," premiered in August 2013.

Jesús Pat Chablé is often credited with being one of the first Maya-language rappers and producers.

See also

• Yucatec Maya Sign Language

References

Barrera Vásquez, Alfredo (dir.); Juan Ramón Bastarrachea Manzano (ed.); William Brito Sansores (ed.); Refugio Vermont Salas (col.); David Dzul Góngora (col.); Domingo Dzul Poot (col.) (2007) [1980]. Diccionario Maya (in Spanish). Mexico City [Mérida, Yucatán]: Editorial Porrúa [Cordemex]. ISBN 978-970-07-2741-7.CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link)

• Blair, Robert W.; Refugio Vermont Salas; Norman A. McQuown (rev.) (1995) [1966]. Spoken Yucatec Maya (Book I + Audio, Lessons I-VI; Book II + Audio, Lessons VII-XII). Program in Latin American Studies. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University—University of North Carolina.

Bolles, David (1997). "Combined Dictionary–Concordance of the Yucatecan Mayan Language". Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI) (revised 2003). Retrieved 2007-02-01.

Bolles, David; Alejandra Bolles (2004). "A Grammar of the Yucatecan Mayan Language". Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI) (revised online edition, 1996 Lee, New Hampshire). The Foundation Research Department. Retrieved 2007-02-01.

Bricker, Victoria; Eleuterio Po'ot Yah; Ofelia Dzul de Po'ot (1998). A Dictionary of the Maya Language as Spoken in Hocabá, Yucatán. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ISBN 0-87480-569-4.

Brody, Michal (2004). The fixed word, the moving tongue: variation in written Yucatec Maya and the meandering evolution toward unified norms (PhD thesis, UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Digital Repository ed.). Austin: University of Texas. hdl:2152/1882. OCLC 74908453.

Coe, Michael D. (1992). Breaking the Maya Code. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-05061-9. OCLC 26605966.

Curl, John (2005). Ancient American Poets - The Songs of Dzitbalche. Tempe: Bilingual Press. ISBN 1-931010-21-8.

McQuown, Norman A. (1968). "Classical Yucatec (Maya)". In Norman A. McQuown (Volume ed.). Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 5: Linguistics. R. Wauchope (General Editor). Austin: University of Texas Press. pp. 201–248. ISBN 0-292-73665-7. OCLC 277126.

Tozzer, Alfred M. (1977) [1921]. A Maya Grammar (unabridged republication ed.). New York: Dover. ISBN 0-486-23465-7. OCLC 3152525.

External links

• Yucatec Maya Collection of William Blunk-Fernández and Michael Carrasco at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Contains six audio recordings totaling 1.5 hours of spoken Yucatec Maya.
• Mesospace Collection of Juergen Bohnemeyer at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Contains 19 video recordings. Content restricted, but may be available for researcher use.
• Mayan Languages Collection of Victoria Bricker at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Contains 714 archival files, including audio recordings and transcriptions, from the languages Chol, Tzotzil, and Yucatec Maya. The recordings include "(1) histories of the Caste War of Yucatan of 1847-1901 and local manifestations of the Mexican Revolution of 1917-1921; (2) legends; (3) astronomical lore; (4) medical lore; (5) autobiographies; (6) conversations; (7) and songs (both traditional and original) from a number of different towns in the peninsula."
• Yucatec Maya Collection of Melissa Frazier at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Contains 60 audio recordings of narratives, collected "to establish a collection of spoken Yucatec Maya that will be helpful to anyone who studies the language."

Language courses

In addition to universities and private institutions in Mexico, (Yucatec) Maya is also taught at:

• OSEA - The Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology
• The University of Chicago
• Leiden University, Netherlands
• Harvard University
• Tulane University
• Indiana University (Minority Languages & Culture Program)
• University of Wisconsin–Madison
• The University of North Carolina
• INALCO, Paris, France

Free online dictionary, grammar and texts:

• FAMSI © 2001: David Bolles
• University of Quintana Roo, 2009 (pdf)