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Language Lineage

Western Mayan

Kaufman's grouping of Cholan-Tzeltalan with Q'anjob'alan. In the Cholan-Tzeltalan languages Proto-Mayan *k became ch, as it did in Yucatecan: *kaq 'red' is Yucatec chak beside K'iche' kaq. Q'anjob'al keeps kaq.

c. 1st millennium BCE – presentChiapas, Tabasco and the western highlands and lowlands of Guatemala and Honduras
On this page
  1. Origins
  2. Classifiers and Split Ergativity
  3. Where its languages are spoken
  4. Turning points

01

Origins

Western Mayan joins two groups: the Cholan-Tzeltalan languages, spread from the Chiapas highlands down to the lowlands where the great Classic cities stood, and the Q'anjob'alan languages of the Cuchumatanes and the Mexican border. They share the change of *r to y. Cholan-Tzeltalan also palatalises *k to ch, as Yucatecan does, but Q'anjob'alan mostly keeps k (Q'anjob'al kaq 'red'). Because both are shared with the neighbouring Yucatecan languages, some scholars see them as changes that spread across the lowlands rather than evidence of a single ancestor.

02

Classifiers and Split Ergativity

Two grammatical features of the Western Mayan languages have drawn particular attention from linguists.

The Q'anjob'alan languages have noun classifiers: small words placed before a noun that sort it by kind. In Q'anjob'al, naq marks men and ix women, and other classifiers mark things of wood, stone, maize and so on. They also work like pronouns, so a classifier alone can mean 'he' or 'she'. Q'anjob'al ay jun naq winaq 'there is a man' uses naq before winaq 'man'. Colette Craig's studies of Popti' (Jakaltek) in the 1970s and 1980s made these systems one of the best-known classifier systems in the world.

Ch'ol is well known for split ergativity. In the perfective it marks persons in the usual Mayan ergative way, but in the imperfective and progressive the subject of an intransitive verb is marked like the subject of a transitive one. Jessica Coon has argued that this is because these aspects are built on a nominal structure, a kind of 'I am in my sleeping', rather than a change in the verb itself.

The Tzeltal and Tzotzil of highland Chiapas are among the most thoroughly documented Mayan languages, partly through long-running anthropological projects in Zinacantán and neighbouring communities from the 1950s onwards.

On the map

Where its languages are spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. MexicoCholan-Tzeltalan c. 1.45 million · Q'anjob'alan c. 85,000
  2. GuatemalaCholan-Tzeltalan c. 17,000 · Q'anjob'alan c. 310,000
  3. United StatesQ'anjob'alan

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. Sound lawc. 1st millennium BCEContested

    *k becomes ch

    *k *kʼ → ch chʼ (*kaq 'red' → chak; K'iche' kaq)

    Proto-Mayan *k (and *kʼ) palatalise to ch (chʼ) in Cholan-Tzeltalan and in Yucatecan: *kaq 'red' → Yucatec chak, beside K'iche' kaq. Q'anjob'al keeps kaq, so the change did not cover all of Western Mayan. Whether it happened once in a shared ancestor or spread across neighbouring languages is debated.

    Compare with other assimilation and strengthening across families →

    Sources (1)
    • Campbell, Lyle & Terrence Kaufman. 1985. Mayan linguistics: Where are we now? Annual Review of Anthropology 14.
  2. Splitc. 1st millennium BCEContested

    Cholan-Tzeltalan and Q'anjob'alan part

    The ancestors of the Cholan-Tzeltalan languages move toward Chiapas and the lowlands, while the Q'anjob'alan languages stay in the Cuchumatanes. 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).