LDC Americas (7/7): Yucatec Maya
Linguistic Diversity Challenge – the indigenous languages of the Americas
What is the language called in English and the language itself?
Maya, Maya (Yucatan), Peninsular Maya, Yucatec, Yucatec(o) Proper, Yucateco, Yucatán Maya, Yukateko; endonym: mayaʼ tʼàan, maayaʼ tʼàan
Where is the language spoken?
Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Campeche (Mexico); northern Belize
How many people speak the language?
There are close to 800000 native speakers.
Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages?
Yucatec Maya is, as the “surname” suggests, a member of the Mayan language family.
What writing system does the language use?
Originally, it was written with the Maya script, the modern orthography is based on the Latin alphabet.
What kind of grammatical features does the language have?
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. [Wikipedia]
What does the language sound like?
The vowel system is relatively simple: i, u, e, o, a, for the consonants, see this:
(From Wikitongues. Speaker: Hilario Chi Canul)
What do you personally find interesting about the language?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucatec_Maya_language
https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/yuca1254
http://www.language-archives.org/language/yua
http://endangeredlanguages.com/lang/6949
http://odin.linguistlist.org/igt_urls.php?lang=yua
https://phoible.org/languages/yuca1254
https://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_yct
http://www.famsi.org/reports/96072/index.html
http://www.uqroo.mx/libros/maya/diccionario.pdf
https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla%3A124378
https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla%3A124464
