Last Updated: 2020-07-02
Background
Language Family: Mayan / Yucatecan / Yucatec-Lacandon
- Yucatec Maya is spoken in the Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Campeche, and Tabasco states of Mexico.
Phonology
Consonants
- /b/, /d/, /ɡ/, /f/, and /r/ occur in Spanish loanwords (Bohnemeyer 2002, 65).
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Place of Articulation
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Manner of Articulation
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Labial
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Alveolar
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Postalveolar
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Palatal
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Velar
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Glottal
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Stops
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p pʼ ɓ
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t tʼ
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k kʼ
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ʔ
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Affricates
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ts tsʼ
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tʃ tʃʼ
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Fricatives
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s
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ʃ
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h
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Nasals
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m
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n
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Flaps
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ɾ
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Approximants
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w
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l
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j
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Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are plain and those on the right are ejective. The labial stops are ordered plain, ejective, and implosive.
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Vowels
- Vowels can occur with four contrastive sets of suprasegmental features (Frazier 2009, 18–19).
- As summarized by Frazier (2009), these are the four vowel shapes in terms of length, pitch, and glottalization (p. 19):
- SHORT: short, unmarked for tone, modal voice
- LOW TONE: long, low tone, modal voice
- HIGH TONE: long, high tone, modal voice
- GLOTTALIZED: long, high tone followed by creaky voice
- Frazier (2009) also states that the glottalized vowels are produced with an intervening glottal stop (i.e. [v́ʔv]); however, in fast speech, this glottal stop is not always realized (p. 20).
- Per discussions with Scott AnderBois, an expert on the language, the rules will represent “glottalized” vowels as a long, high tone vowel followed by creaky voice rather than a vowel interrupted by a glottal stop.
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Front
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Central
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Back
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High
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i
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u
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Mid
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e
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o
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Low
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a
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Vowel Shapes
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Orthographic Representation
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Our Transcription
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Short
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V
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V
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Low Tone
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VV
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V ː ˨
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High Tone
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V́V
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V ː ˦
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Glottalized
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V’V
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V ː ˦ ˷
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Alphabet
- Note: /tsʼ/ is not represented in the Crúbadán corpus.
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Grapheme
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Phoneme
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a
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/a/
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b
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/ɓ/
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e
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/e/
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i
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/i/
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j
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/h/
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k
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/k/
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k’
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/kʼ/
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l
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/l/
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m
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/m/
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n
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/n/
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o
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/o/
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p
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/p/
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p’
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/pʼ/
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r
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/ɾ/
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s
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/s/
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t
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/t/
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t’
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/tʼ/
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u
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/u/
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x
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/ʃ/
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w
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/w/
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y
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/j/
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’
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/ʔ/
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Digraph
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ch
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/tʃ/
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ch’
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/tʃʼ/
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tz
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/ts/
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tz’
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/tsʼ/
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Lenition Rules
- When there exists two identical adjacent consonants:
- Sonorants and some fricatives undergo degemination
- For other consonant sounds, the first unit, if an ejective, debuccalizes to [ʔ] and if not an ejective, debuccalizes to [h] (Orie and Bricker 2000, 295).
- /k/ debuccalizes to [h] preceding any consonant (Rogers 2016, 81).
Misc. Rules
- On the morphophonemic level, Yucatec Maya has vowel deletion rules (creating consonant clusters) and elision rules that elide the first consonant in a cluster. These types of rules may operate in conjunction. However, Bohnemeyer (2002) does not describe these rules in great detail (p. 66-67).
- Glottal stops occur predictably preceding word-initial vowels (Bohnemeyer 2002, 65).
References
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen. 2002. The Grammar of Time Reference in Yukatek Maya. Lincom.
Frazier, Melissa. 2009. “The Production and Perception of Pitch and Glottalization in Yucatec Maya.” PhD thesis, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Orie, Ola Olanike, and Victoria R. Bricker. 2000. “Placeless and Historical Laryngeals in Yucatec Maya.” International Journal of American Linguistics 66 (3): 283–317.
Rogers, Chris. 2016. The Use and Development of the Xinkan Languages. First edition. Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas Mellon Foundation Initiative. Austin: University of Texas Press.