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The Mayan languages are a group of languages spoken by the Maya peoples.The Maya form an enormous group of approximately 7 million people who are descended from an ancient Mesoamerican civilization and spread across the modern-day countries of: Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
The Maya area is now dominated by the Spanish language. While a number of Mayan languages are moribund or are considered endangered, others remain quite viable, with speakers across all age groups and native language use in all domains of society. [notes 7]
A Yucatec Maya speaker singing with a guitar. Yucatec Maya (/ ˈ j uː k ə t ɛ k ˈ m aɪ ə / YOO-kə-tek MY-ə; referred to by its speakers as mayaʼ or maayaʼ t’aan [màːjaʔˈtʼàːn] ⓘ) is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula, including part of northern Belize.
Yucatecan speakers are thought to have first settled the Maya Lowlands some 400 years after the diversification of Core Mayan, which has been glottochronologically dated to around 1900 BC. [3] [note 2] There, they were joined by Ch’olan–Tseltan speakers sometime during 1000–800 BC, though only Ch’olan speakers remained after about 200 ...
The only indigenous language spoken by more than a million people in Mexico is the Nahuatl language; the other Native American languages with a large population of native speakers (at least 400,000 speakers) include Yucatec Maya, Tzeltal Maya, Tzotzil Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec.
Around 200 CE speakers of the Tzeltalan branch of Proto-Cholan moved south into Chiapas displacing speakers of Zoquean languages. [12] Throughout the southern part of the Maya area and the highlands the elite of the Classic Maya centers spoke a common prestige language based on Cholan, a variant often referred to as Classic Ch'olti'an. [13]
Itzaʼ (also known as Itza or Itzaj) is an endangered Mayan language spoken by the Itza people near Lake Peten Itza in north-central Guatemala and neighboring Belize. The language has about 1,000 fluent speakers, all older adults. [2] Itzaʼ was the language of administration across much of the Yucatán Peninsula during the supremacy of Chichen ...
The inclusion of the Ch’olan languages within the Chʼolan–Tseltalan, Western Mayan, and Core Mayan families is the most widely accepted classification as of 2017. [1] Nonetheless, while it is generally accepted that the Western Mayan family comprises Ch’olan–Tseltalan and Greater Q’anjob’alan languages, this has never been ...