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 in the 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 situated from Guatemala City, and is the last departmental capital on the Pan-American High ...

, and some 500 the adjoining part of Chiapas 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 Guatema ...

. 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 Guatemalan organisation that regulates the use of the 22 Mayan languages spoken within the borders of the republic. It has expended particu ...

and the

Guatemalan Congress The Congress of the Republic ( es, Congreso de la República) is the unicameral legislature of the Republic of Guatemala. The Guatemalan Congress is made up of 160 deputies who are elected by direct universal suffrage to serve four-year terms. ...

Distribution

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

Jacaltenango Jacaltenango is a town and municipality situated in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. It is located in a valley surrounded by the Sierra Madre Mountains. Jacaltenango serves as the municipal seat for the surrounding municipality of the same na ...

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

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-west ...

. 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 c ...

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 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 XEVFS-AM (''La Voz de la Frontera Sur'' – "The Voice of the Southern Border") is an indigenous community radio station that broadcasts in Spanish, Tojolabal, Mam, Tseltal, Tsotsil and Popti (otherwise known as Jakaltek) from Las Margar ...

, broadcasting from

Las Margaritas, Chiapas Las Margaritas is a city, and the surrounding municipality of the same name, in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The municipal seat is located some 25 km to the northeast of Comitán de Domínguez, while the municipality extends to the east a ...

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 Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

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

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