![]() Speakers of the western branch moved south into the areas now inhabited by Mamean and Quichean people. Proto-Yucatecan and Proto-Chʼolan speakers subsequently split off from the main group and moved north into the Yucatán Peninsula. Īccording to the prevailing classification scheme by Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman, the first division occurred around 2200 BCE, when Huastecan split away from Mayan proper after its speakers moved northwest along the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson have reconstructed more than 3000 lexical items for the proto-Mayan language. The earliest proposal which identified the Chiapas-Guatemalan highlands as the likely "cradle" of Mayan languages was published by the German antiquarian and scholar Karl Sapper in 1912. The Proto-Mayan language is believed to have been spoken in the Cuchumatanes highlands of central Guatemala in an area corresponding roughly to where Qʼanjobalan is spoken today. Mayan languages are the descendants of a proto-language called Proto-Mayan or, in Kʼicheʼ Maya, Nabʼee Mayaʼ Tzij ("the old Maya Language"). The region shown as Proto-Mayan is now occupied by speakers of the Qʼanjobalan branch (light blue in other figures). History Proto-Mayan Approximate migration routes and dates for various Mayan language families. The surviving corpus of over 5,000 known individual Maya inscriptions on buildings, monuments, pottery and bark-paper codices, combined with the rich post-Conquest literature in Mayan languages written in the Latin script, provides a basis for the modern understanding of pre-Columbian history unparalleled in the Americas. Its use was particularly widespread during the Classic period of Maya civilization (c. They also possess grammatical and typological features that set them apart from other languages of Mesoamerica, such as the use of ergativity in the grammatical treatment of verbs and their subjects and objects, specific inflectional categories on verbs, and a special word class of "positionals" which is typical of all Mayan languages.ĭuring the pre-Columbian era of Mesoamerican history, some Mayan languages were written in the logo-syllabic Maya script. For example, all use relational nouns instead of prepositions to indicate spatial relationships. All Mayan languages display the basic diagnostic traits of this linguistic area. Mayan languages form part of the Mesoamerican language area, an area of linguistic convergence developed throughout millennia of interaction between the peoples of Mesoamerica. The proto-Mayan language diversified into at least six different branches: the Huastecan, Quichean, Yucatecan, Qanjobalan, Mamean and Chʼolan–Tzeltalan branches. Modern Mayan languages descend from the Proto-Mayan language, thought to have been spoken at least 5,000 years ago it has been partially reconstructed using the comparative method. ![]() The Mayan language family is one of the best-documented and most studied in the Americas. In 1996, Guatemala formally recognized 21 Mayan languages by name, and Mexico recognizes eight within its territory. Mayan languages are spoken by at least six million Maya people, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica, both in the south of Mexico and northern Central America.
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