The Jakaltek (''Jacaltec'') language , also known as Jakalteko (''Jacalteco'') or Poptiʼ, is a

Mayan language Mayan most commonly refers to: * Maya peoples, various indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and northern Central America * Maya civilization, pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica and northern Central America * Mayan languages, language family spoken ...

of Guatemala spoken by 90,000

Jakaltek people The Jakaltek people are a Mayan people of Guatemala. They have lived in the foothills of the Cuchumatán Mountains in the Department of Huehuetenango in northwestern Guatemala since pre-Columbian times, centered on the town of Jacaltenango. ...

in the department of Huehuetenango, and some 500 the adjoining part of

Chiapas Chiapas (; Tzotzil and Tzeltal: ''Chyapas'' ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Chiapas), is one of the states that make up the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It comprises 124 municipalities ...

in southern

Mexico Mexico ( Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guate ...

. The name ''Poptiʼ'' for the language is used by the

Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala The Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, or ALMG (English: ''Guatemalan Academy of Mayan Languages'') is a Guatemala Guatemala ( ; ), officially the Republic of Guatemala ( es, República de Guatemala, links=no), is a country in Central A ...

and the Guatemalan Congress.

Distribution

Municipalities where Jakaltek is spoken include the following (''Variación Dialectal en Poptiʼ, 2000''). *

Concepción Huista Concepción Huista () is a town and municipality in the Guatemalan department of Huehuetenango. Climate Concepción Huista has a subtropical highland climate ( Köppen: ''Cwb''). Geographic location Concepción Huista is completely surr ...

* Jacaltenango (including the following villages) ** '' San Marcos Huista'' ** '' San Andrés Huista'' ** '' Yinhchʼewex'' * Nentón * San Antonio Huista *

Santa Ana Huista Santa Ana Huista () is a municipality in the Guatemalan department of Huehuetenango Huehuetenango () is a city and municipality in the highlands of western Guatemala. It is also the capital of the department of Huehuetenango. The city is situat ...

Guadalupe Victoria Guadalupe Victoria (; 29 September 178621 March 1843), born José Miguel Ramón Adaucto Fernández y Félix, was a Mexican general and political leader who fought for independence against the Spanish Empire in the Mexican War of Independence. He ...

, Chiapas, Mexico * Buxup * Tzisbʼaj

Phonology

The Eastern Jakaltek language includes the following

phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

. The orthography used by the

is on the left, the other main orthography is on the right. It also has the vowels a , e , i , o , u

Eastern Jakaltek is one of the few languages besides the

Malagasy language Malagasy (; ) is an Austronesian language and the national language of Madagascar. Malagasy is the westernmost Malayo-Polynesian language, brought to Madagascar by the settlement of Austronesian peoples from the Sunda islands around the 5th cen ...

Madagascar Madagascar (; mg, Madagasikara, ), officially the Republic of Madagascar ( mg, Repoblikan'i Madagasikara, links=no, ; french: République de Madagascar), is an island country in the Indian Ocean, approximately off the coast of East Africa ...

to make use of an n-

trema Trema may refer to: * a List of Greek and Latin roots in English/P–Z#T, Greek and Latin root meaning ''hole'' * ''Tréma'', a word in French meaning diaeresis ** more generally, two dots (diacritic) * Trema (plant), ''Trema'' (plant), a genus of ...

character in its alphabet. In both languages, the n-trema represents a

velar nasal The voiced velar nasal, also known as agma, from the Greek word for 'fragment', is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ''ng'' in English ''sing'' as well as ''n'' before velar consonants as in ''Englis ...

consonant (like "ng" in "bang"). Jakaltek-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XEVFS, broadcasting from Las Margaritas, Chiapas.

Grammar

The Jakaltek language has a verb–subject–object syntax. Like many Native American languages, Jakaltek has complex

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

morphology and uses ergative–absolutive case alignment. It is divided in two dialects, Eastern and Western Jakalteko. "Eastern and Western Jakalteko understand each other's spoken languages, but not written text." Jakaltek is unusual in that it has four systems of noun and numeral classifiers. Owing to Jakaltek's dissimilarity with

Indo-European language The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...

s, the reasonably healthy linguistic population and the relative ease of access to Guatemala, Jakaltek has become a favorite of students of

linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...

References

External links

Jacalteco Collection of Colette Grinevald
– Collection of audio recordings in Jakaltek at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas {{DEFAULTSORT:Jakaltek Language Agglutinative languages Indigenous languages of Mexico Indigenous languages of Central America Languages of Guatemala Huehuetenango Department Mayan languages Indigenous peoples of Central America Mesoamerican languages Verb–subject–object languages