Native to Guatemala, Mexico Ethnicity Jakaltek ISO 639-3 jac | Region Huehuetenango, Chiapas Native speakers (9,500 cited 1990) | |
Language family Mayan
Q’anjobalan–Chujean
Q'anjobalan
Kanjobal–Jacaltec
Jakaltek | ||
The Jakaltek /hɑːkəlˈtɛk/ language (Jacalteco), also called Popti’, is a Mayan language of Guatemala spoken by 9,000 Jakaltek people in the department of Huehuetenango, and some 500 the adjoining part of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The name Popti' for the language is used by the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala and the Guatemalan Congress.
Contents
Distribution
Municipalities where Jakaltek is spoken include the following (Variación Dialectal en Popti', 2000).
Phonology
The Eastern Jakaltek language includes the following phonemes:
It also has the vowels a /a/, e /e/, i /i/, o /o/, u /u/
Eastern Jakaltek is one of the few languages besides the Malagasy language of Madagascar to make use of an n-trema character in its alphabet. In both languages, the n-trema represents a velar nasal consonant [ŋ] (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 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."
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.