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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.
Mayan languages are spoken by at least six million Maya people, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. In 1996, Guatemala formally recognized 21 Mayan languages by name, [1] [notes 2] and Mexico recognizes eight within its territory. The Mayan language family is one of the best-documented and most studied in the ...
Proto-Mayan is the hypothetical common ancestor of the 30 living Mayan languages, as well as the Classic Maya language documented in the Maya inscriptions.While there has been some controversy with Mayan subgrouping, there has been a general agreement that the following are the main five subgroups of the family: Huastecan, Yucatecan, Cholan-Tzeltalan, Kanjobalan-Chujean, and Quichean-Mamean.
Classic Maya (or properly Classical Chʼoltiʼ) is the oldest historically attested member of the Mayan language family. It is the main language documented in the pre-Columbian inscriptions of the classical period of the Maya civilization. [1] It is also the common ancestor of the Cholan branch of the Mayan language family.
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.
Spanish is the official language of Guatemala, and is spoken by 93% of the population. [1] Guatemalan Spanish is the local variant of the Spanish language.. Twenty-two Mayan languages are spoken, especially in rural areas, as well as two non-Mayan Amerindian languages: Xinca, an indigenous language, and Garifuna, an Arawakan language spoken on the Caribbean coast.
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.
In the 21st century in the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexican states of Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo), between 750,000 and 1,200,000 people speak Mayan. However, three times more than that are of Maya origins, hold ancient Maya surnames, and do not speak Mayan languages as their first language.