Yucatec Maya language

Yucatán Peninsula

Yucatec Maya forms part of the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan language family. The Yucatecan branch is divided by linguists into the subgroups Mopan-itza and Yucatec-Lacandon. These are made up by 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.[6]

Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus traded with Maya merchants off the coast of Yucatán during his expedition for the Spanish Crown in 1502, but he never made landfall. During the decade following Columbus's first contact with the Maya, the first Spaniards to set foot on Yucatán soil did so by chance, as survivors of a shipwreck in the Caribbean. The Maya ritually sacrificed most of these men, leaving just two survivors, Gerónimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero, who somehow rejoined other Spaniards.[7]

In 1519, Aguilar accompanied Hernán Cortés to the Yucatán island of Cozumel, and also took part in the conquest of central Mexico. 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 fought against the Spanish.[7]

Francisco de Montejo's military incursion of Yucatán took three generations and three wars with extended fighting, which 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. They 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 among three important centers, Uxmal, Chichen Uitza, and Mayapan. The society grew and the people were able to practice intellectual and artistic achievement during a period of peace. When war broke out, such progress was stalled. By the 15th century, Mayan Toltec collapsed and was abandoned.

As the Spanish colonists settled more areas, in the 18th century they developed the lands for large maize and cattle plantations. The elite lived in haciendas and exported natural resources as commodities.[8] 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. They wanted to shape it to serve their ends of religious conversion and social control.[9]

Spanish religious missionaries undertook a project of linguistic and social transformation known as reducción (from Spanish reducir). The missionaries translated Catholic Christian religious texts from Spanish into Yucatec Maya and created neologisms to express Catholic religious concepts. The result of this process of reducción was Maya reducido, a semantically transformed version of Yucatec Maya.[9] Missionaries attempted to end Maya religious practices and destroy associated written works. By their translations, they also shaped a language that was used to convert, subjugate, and govern the Maya population of the Yucatán peninsula. But Maya speakers appropriated Maya reducido for their own purposes, resisting 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[7]

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 (tʼàan "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 bʼ, 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 -oʼob.

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)[14] where intransitive subjects are encoded like agents or patients based upon a number of semantic properties as well as the perfectivity of the event.

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 ⟨tzʼ⟩ in the revised ALMG orthography).

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.[16]

Baktun, the "first ever Mayan telenovela," premiered in August 2013.[17][18]

Jesús Pat Chablé is often credited with being one of the first Maya-language rappers and producers.[19]

In the 2018 video game Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the inhabitants of the game's Paititi region speak in Yucatec Maya (while immersion mode is on).

The modern bible edition, the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures was released[20] in the Maya language in 2019.[21] It's distributed without charge, both printed and online editions.

On December 4, 2019, the Congress of Yucatan unanimously approved a measure requiring the teaching of the Maya language in schools in the state.[22]

• Yucatec Maya Sign Language

Yucatec Maya language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• 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 Chʼol, 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."