ABSTRACT
Mayan languages are spoken by approximately six million people in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. Mayan languages share a common ancestor, known as Proto-Mayan, which was spoken over 4,000 years ago in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Many of the roughly 30 Mayan languages spoken today share properties of the proto-language, including glottalized stops, contrastive vowel length, and CVC roots. Mayan languages are primarily head-initial, head-marking, synthetic, and agglutinative. All Mayan languages are morphologically ergative and some are syntactically ergative as well. The field of Mayan linguistics benefits from both a long tradition of scholarship and invaluable contributions by native speaker linguists. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the core linguistic phenomena shared by members of the Mayan language family, while highlighting some of the family’s internal variation.
