K'iche' language
Encyclopedia
The K’iche’ language is a part of the Mayan language
family. It is spoken by many K'iche' people in the central highlands of Guatemala
. With close to a million speakers (some 7% of Guatemala's population), it is the second-most widely spoken language in the country after Spanish. Most speakers of K'iche' also have at least a working knowledge of Spanish
except in some isolated rural villages. One of the notable speakers of the Quiché language is Rigoberta Menchú
.
There is substantial dialectal variation, and the main dialects are sometimes considered to be separate languages. Most speakers use Central K'iche', which is the most commonly used in the media and education. Other dialects include West Central, San Andrés, Joyabaj, Eastern, Nahualá and Cunén. Although it is just one of the national languages and not the official language of Guatemala, and the first-language literacy rate is low, K'iche' is increasingly taught in schools and used on radio.
The most famous work in the Classical K'iche' language is the Popol Vuh
(Popol Wu'uj in modern spelling).
have been used to transliterate the K'iche' language. The classic orthography of Father Ximénez who wrote down the Popol Wuj is based on the Spanish orthography and has been replaced by a new standardized orthography defined by the ALMG (Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala
). Ethnohistorian and Mayanist Dennis Tedlock
uses his own transliteration system completely different from any of the established orthographies, but this system will not be given here.
is not uncommon, and some modern speakers do also use SVO order.
dialect of K'iche' shows some differences from other K'iche' dialects:
Nahualá preserves an ancient Proto-Mayan
distinction between five long vowels (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu) and five short vowels (a, e, i, o, u). It is for this conservative linguistic feature that Guatemalan and foreign linguists have actively sought to have the language called "K'ichee'," rather than K'iche' or Quiché.
Unlike the most prominent K'ichee' dialects, the Nahualá dialect of K'ichee' also has a phoneme /h/ and a phoneme /N/, both of which occur only at the ends of words, almost exclusively after short vowels. Linguists have established firmly that the /h/ is a reflex of a proto-Mayan */h/. Linguists have not thoroughly investigated the origin of the /N/ phoneme, which occurs only in a few words.
Mayan languages
The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...
family. It is spoken by many K'iche' people in the central highlands of Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
. With close to a million speakers (some 7% of Guatemala's population), it is the second-most widely spoken language in the country after Spanish. Most speakers of K'iche' also have at least a working knowledge of Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
except in some isolated rural villages. One of the notable speakers of the Quiché language is Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is an indigenous Guatemalan, of the K'iche' ethnic group. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the plight of Guatemala's indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War , and to promoting indigenous rights in the country...
.
There is substantial dialectal variation, and the main dialects are sometimes considered to be separate languages. Most speakers use Central K'iche', which is the most commonly used in the media and education. Other dialects include West Central, San Andrés, Joyabaj, Eastern, Nahualá and Cunén. Although it is just one of the national languages and not the official language of Guatemala, and the first-language literacy rate is low, K'iche' is increasingly taught in schools and used on radio.
The most famous work in the Classical K'iche' language is the Popol Vuh
Popol Vuh
Popol Vuh is a corpus of mytho-historical narratives of the Post Classic Quiché kingdom in Guatemala's western highlands. The title translates as "Book of the Community," "Book of Counsel," or more literally as "Book of the People."...
(Popol Wu'uj in modern spelling).
Vowels
| a | open front unrounded vowel | [a] |
| ä | mid centre unrounded vowel | [ə] |
| e | close-mid front unrounded vowel Close-mid front unrounded vowel The close-mid front unrounded vowel, or high-mid front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is .... |
[e] |
| i | close front unrounded vowel Close front unrounded vowel The close front unrounded vowel, or high front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is .... |
[i] |
| o | close-mid back rounded vowel | [o] |
| u | close back rounded vowel Close back rounded vowel The close back rounded vowel, or high back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is u.... |
[u] |
Consonants
| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
|||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | implosive Implosive consonant Implosive consonants are stops with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can... |
plain | ejective Ejective consonant In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants... |
plain | ejective | plain | ejective | plain | ejective | plain | ||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... s |
m [m] | n [n] | nh [ŋ] | |||||||||
| Plosive | p [p] | b' [ɓ] | t [t] | t' [tʼ] | k [k] | k' [kʼ] | q [q] | q' [qʼ] | ' [ʔ] | |||
| Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :... |
tz [ts] | tz' [tsʼ] | ch [tʃ] | ch' [tʃʼ] | ||||||||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
s [s] | x [ʃ] | j [χ] | h [h] | ||||||||
| Rhotic Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet... |
r [r] | |||||||||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
l [l] | y [j] | w [w] | |||||||||
Orthography
Historically different orthographiesOrthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
have been used to transliterate the K'iche' language. The classic orthography of Father Ximénez who wrote down the Popol Wuj is based on the Spanish orthography and has been replaced by a new standardized orthography defined by the ALMG (Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala
Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala
The Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, or ALMG is a Guatemalan organisation that regulates the use of the 21 Mayan languages spoken within the borders of the republic. It has expended particular efforts on standardising the various writing systems used...
). Ethnohistorian and Mayanist Dennis Tedlock
Dennis Tedlock
Dennis Tedlock is the McNulty Professor of English and Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. in 1968 from Tulane University...
uses his own transliteration system completely different from any of the established orthographies, but this system will not be given here.
| The first line of Popol Wuj in different orthographies: | |
| Ximénez's classical orthography | Are v xe oher tzíh varal Quíche ubí. |
| ALMG orthography | Are’ uxe’ ojer tzij waral K’iche’ ub’i’. |
| (Ximénez's Spanish translation) | Este es el principio de las Antiguas historias aquí en el Quiché. |
| (Tedlock's English translation) | "This is the beginning of the ancient word, here in the place called Quiché." |
Syntax and morphology
The Basic order of K'iche' is verb-object-subject (VOS); like most mayan languages it is verb-initial. Variation in word orderWord order
In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...
is not uncommon, and some modern speakers do also use SVO order.
Dialects
The NahualáNahualá
Nahualá is a municipality in the Sololá department of Guatemala. The town is sometimes known as Santa Catarina Nahualá, in honor of the town’s patron saint, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, but the official name is just "Nahualá"....
dialect of K'iche' shows some differences from other K'iche' dialects:
Nahualá preserves an ancient Proto-Mayan
Proto-Mayan
Proto-Mayan is the hypothetical common ancestor of the 30 living Mayan languages, as well as the Classic Maya languages documented in the Maya Hieroglyphical inscriptions.-Phonology:...
distinction between five long vowels (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu) and five short vowels (a, e, i, o, u). It is for this conservative linguistic feature that Guatemalan and foreign linguists have actively sought to have the language called "K'ichee'," rather than K'iche' or Quiché.
Unlike the most prominent K'ichee' dialects, the Nahualá dialect of K'ichee' also has a phoneme /h/ and a phoneme /N/, both of which occur only at the ends of words, almost exclusively after short vowels. Linguists have established firmly that the /h/ is a reflex of a proto-Mayan */h/. Linguists have not thoroughly investigated the origin of the /N/ phoneme, which occurs only in a few words.