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Language Lineage

Eastern Mayan

The Mayan languages of the Guatemalan highlands, grouped by Kaufman on shared grammar and vocabulary. They keep the uvular stops q and qʼ, which Yucatecan and Cholan merged with k.

c. 1st millennium BCE – presentThe central and western highlands of Guatemala
On this page
  1. Origins
  2. The Largest Mayan Languages
  3. Where its languages are spoken
  4. Turning points

01

Origins

Eastern Mayan takes in the two groups of the Guatemalan highlands: K'iche'an, which includes K'iche', Kaqchikel, Tz'utujil and Q'eqchi', and Mamean, which includes Mam and Ixil. Together they have the most speakers of any Mayan branch. They are conservative in one obvious respect: they keep Proto-Mayan's uvular stops, so 'red' is K'iche' kaq with q, where Yucatec has chak. They differ in how they treat *r, which K'iche'an keeps and Mamean turns into t.

02

The Largest Mayan Languages

Eastern Mayan contains the two most widely spoken Mayan languages. In Guatemala's 2018 census about 1.13 million people said they had learned to speak in Q'eqchi', and about 1.05 million in K'iche'. Mam followed with about 590,000 and Kaqchikel with roughly 400,000. Together the Eastern Mayan languages account for well over half of all Mayan speakers.

The picture is not uniform. Q'eqchi' has grown fastest, adding over 400,000 first-language speakers between the 2002 and 2018 censuses, helped by high birth rates and by settlement in the Petén lowlands, Izabal and southern Belize. Kaqchikel, spoken close to Guatemala City and the tourist towns of Lake Atitlán and Antigua, lost about 20,000 first-language speakers over the same period as more children grew up speaking Spanish. At the other end of the scale are small K'iche'an languages such as Uspantek, Sakapultek and Sipakapense, and the Mamean Tektitek, each with a few thousand speakers.

The official languages are also distinguished more finely than linguists might distinguish them. Guatemala recognises 22 Mayan languages, and some of the distinctions, such as those between K'iche' and Achi, follow community identity as much as linguistic distance.

On the map

Where its languages are spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. GuatemalaMamean c. 740,000 · K'iche'an c. 2.9 million
  2. BelizeK'iche'an c. 20,000
  3. MexicoMamean c. 12,000
  4. United StatesMamean

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 1st millennium BCEContested

    K'iche'an and Mamean part

    The highland dialects divide into K'iche'an in the central highlands and Mamean in the west. The date is a glottochronological estimate.

    Sources (1)
    • Kaufman, Terrence. 1976. Archaeological and linguistic correlations in Mayaland and associated areas of Meso-America. World Archaeology 8(1).