Where is mayan spoken

Campbell, Lyle. American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford University Press. Oxford Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have more information on this language: contact sorosoro. Find out where thousands of languages are spoken. Who speaks the Mayan languages? Total number of speakers estimated : 5 according to the site ethnologue. Are Mayan languages in danger?

This family includes several endangered languages. Sources: Campbell, Lyle. Language Planisphere. Mexico recognizes 10 Mayan languages in its southeastern region. Mayan languages are mutually unintelligible, meaning a speaker of one will not easily understand a speaker of another, though they may share cultural traits within a group. Most Mayan language speakers prefer their native tongue to Spanish or English. A few Mayan languages are tonal, such as Yucatec Maya. Vocabulary for all comes from Proto-Mayan, spoken 5, years ago.

Some words are borrowed from Spanish or other Mayan languages. Share This. Group Purchasing Organization Contracts. Cookies Our website uses cookies to give you the best experience possible. The Mayan languages are also spoken by small diasporic communities, especially throughout the United States.

Mam in particular is spoken in Oakland, California and Washington, D. We do know that they share features with several other language families in the region. This phenomenon of similar but possibly unrelated languages in close geographic proximity even has a name. The common features among languages in the Mesoamerican sprachbund are pretty technical.

Both of these features are uncommon on a global scale. One thing that Mayan languages have in common is their writing systems. Romanization is a direct result of the area being colonized. Before that, the Mayan writing system was logographic one symbol representing one idea, like Chinese. Nowadays, this logographic system is mostly of interest to archaeologists and historians. However, each system is pretty straightforward, with one letter representing one unique sound.

In terms of grammar, Mayan languages are similar in that they are highly agglutinative. This means that they often use a single word or what appears to be a single word to convey what many other languages need a whole sentence to express.

This is a feature that the Mayan languages share with Uralic , Tibetic and Dravidian languages.