Itzaʼ (also known as Itza or Itzaj) is an

endangered An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching, inv ...

Mayan language spoken by the

Itza people The Itza are a Maya ethnic group descendants of the Chanes Maya, Chanes from the Chontal Maya, Chontal region of Tabasco from where they made a historic migration arriving at Bacalar and northern Yucatán during the 10th century, then they arri ...

near Lake Peten Itza in north-central

Guatemala Guatemala, officially the Republic of Guatemala, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico, to the northeast by Belize, to the east by Honduras, and to the southeast by El Salvador. It is hydrologically b ...

and neighboring

Belize Belize is a country on the north-eastern coast of Central America. It is bordered by Mexico to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Guatemala to the west and south. It also shares a maritime boundary with Honduras to the southeast. P ...

. The language has about 1,000 fluent speakers, all older adults. Itzaʼ was the language of administration across much of the

Yucatán Peninsula The Yucatán Peninsula ( , ; ) is a large peninsula in southeast Mexico and adjacent portions of Belize and Guatemala. The peninsula extends towards the northeast, separating the Gulf of Mexico to the north and west of the peninsula from the C ...

during the supremacy of

Chichen Itza Chichén Itzá , , often with the emphasis reversed in English to ; from () "at the mouth of the well of the Itza people, Itza people" (often spelled ''Chichen Itza'' in English and traditional Yucatec Maya) was a large Pre-Columbian era, ...

. Later, the Itza people had the last independent Maya nation in

Mesoamerica Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El S ...

until 1697. During this time, the Itza people resettled their ancestral home in the

Petén Basin The Petén Basin is a geographical subregion of the Maya Lowlands, primarily located in northern Guatemala within the Department of El Petén, and into the state of Campeche in southeastern Mexico. During the Late Preclassic and Classic periods ...

. The subjugation of the Itza capital by the Spanish forced the Itza people to flee or live amongst the Spaniards, such as in San Jose, Guatemala, where the only modern speakers of the language live. The modern Itza people are the last of the Lowland Maya to be able to directly trace their heritage back to the

pre-Columbian era In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European col ...

. The Itzaʼ language reflects this history in its nomenclature for the natural world: Itzaʼ words referring to agriculture and agricultural practices remain unchanged since first being recorded. Additionally, Itzaʼ possesses a rich vocabulary for crops and animals that encodes specific information about different varietals and individuals of the species.

Classification

Itzaʼ belongs to the Yucatecan branch of Mayan Languages. The other languages in the Yucatecan branch are Yucatec, Lacandon, and Mopan. All Yucatecan languages are closely linked with each other. However, people speaking Itzaʼ and those speaking Yucatec have difficulties understanding each other. There are 12 different branches of Mayan language, all with sub families like Itzaʼ.

History

The government of Guatemala banned the speaking of Itzá in the 1930s and two generations of Itzá Maya have grown up learning only Spanish. The late 1980s brought an increase in interest among Maya people, including the Itzá, in preserving their cultural heritage. The Guatemalan government has set up an institution, 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 partic ...

, to help develop and preserve various Mayan languages, including Itzaʼ.

Geographic distribution

Itzaʼ is spoken on the north shore of Lake Petén Itzá in San José,

Petén Department Petén (from the Itza' language, Itz'a, , 'Great Island') is a Departments of Guatemala, department of Guatemala. It is geographically the northernmost department of Guatemala, as well as the largest by area at it accounts for about one third o ...

, Guatemala. Among the ethnic population of 2,000, there are only about 1,000 Itzaʼ speakers remaining, most of which also use Spanish.

Phonology

Consonants

The following chart shows the consonant phonemes of Itza: Where the orthography differs from the IPA notation, the orthography used by the

is noted in brackets. The phonemes /d, g, f, v, r, ɲ/ have been adopted from Spanish and are present only in loanwords.

Vowels

The following chart shows the vowel phonemes of Itza. All vowels except /ə/ have long equivalent, and vowel length is contrastive. The Itza language does not contain tone or pitch.

Grammar

Nouns

Possession is marked with the same ergative particle as is used in verbal constructions. Possession constructions are marked differently based on whether the possession is inherent or non-inherent. Body parts, family members, and personal property are marked as being possessed differently than are parts of a whole. Additional possession constructions exist and are used generally where the possessor is inanimate. All nouns in Itzaʼ possess

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

. The masculine and feminine genders are overtly marked by a prefix, while the neutral gender is unmarked. Gender is not marked on all nouns: typically,

proper noun A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity ('' Africa''; ''Jupiter''; '' Sarah''; ''Walmart'') as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...

s and professions have marked gender, while other categories do not. The gender markers of Itzaʼ also play the role of rigid designators: specific individuals across all possible worlds will have overtly marked gender, while references to classes of objects will not.

Verbs

Itzaʼ is an ergative-absolutive language demonstrating split ergativity. Ergative

person A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations suc ...

markers indicate intransitive subjects in the imperfective aspect and all transitive subjects, while absolutive person markers indicate intransitive subjects in the

perfective aspect The perfective aspect ( abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole, i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the ...

and in

dependent clause A dependent clause, also known as a subordinate clause, subclause or embedded clause, is a certain type of clause that juxtaposes an independent clause within a complex sentence. For instance, in the sentence "I know Bette is a dolphin", the claus ...

s and all objects. Itzaʼ employs the irrealis

grammatical mood In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement ...

to mark the future tense: the mood is coupled with a temporal adjective to form a future construction. The past tense is similarly constructed by using the perfect tense and temporal adjectives. Similarities in the irrealis and perfect constructions may suggest that the Itzaʼ consider the past and future to be similar, which reflects the Itzaʼ worldview that time is cyclical.

Sentence structure

Itzaʼ has VOS

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...

, although VSO is also common and all word orders are possible.

Topicalization Topicalization is a mechanism of syntax that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic (linguistics), topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence or clause (as opposed to in a canonical position later in the sentence). T ...

is marked by the addition of a suffix and the movement of the topicalized word to the sentence initial position. Generally, modifiers precede the words they modify: adjectives, numerals,

determiner Determiner, also called determinative ( abbreviated ), is a term used in some models of grammatical description to describe a word or affix belonging to a class of noun modifiers. A determiner combines with a noun to express its reference. Examp ...

s, and negation all follow this pattern.

Possessive A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from ; ) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession (linguistics), possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a numbe ...

demonstrative Demonstratives (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning ...

s, and

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase. For example, in the sentence ''I met a man who wasn ...

s all typically follow the words they modify; adjectives can also occur in this position.

Vocabulary

Itzaʼ possesses a rich vocabulary of agriculture and taxonomy. Itza has specific words to encode various properties of different varietals and individuals within a species. Plants and animals of different size, color, and taste are referred to with different terms. Additionally, agricultural terms in Itzaʼ have been virtually uninfluenced by contact with the Spanish, allowing some insight into the commonplace vocabulary of pre-contact Itza.

Sample

Discourse

Discourse in Itzaʼ is marked by its heavy use of repetition and linguistic parallelism. Words and linguistic constructions are often repeated throughout a sentence order to draw emphasis to what is being spoken. The resulting sentences are thus composed of several, complete phrases such as in the sentence: The repetition of the pronoun ''in-ten'' and the verb ''k-im-bʼel'', as well as the near-repetition of the pronoun ''eech/tech'', is typical of Itzaʼ discourse. Such literary style is comparable to parataxis in English, a style of discourse where simple, coordinating sentences are preferred over long, subordinating sentences. Discourse, both common and mythological, often employs framing particles—particles placed before and after a phrase in order to frame the phrase within the discourse as a whole. These particles convey the spatial and temporal relationships between new and old pieces of information in the discourse, creating larger discourse units. The categories tense, aspect, and mood are interwoven in Itzaj Maya verbal and adverbial morphosyntax. Itzaj narrative discourse suggests a division between what a person knows from personal experience centered in one's home and town (the actual), and what is less known, but imaginable, further away in space-time.

Bibliography

* Charles Andrew Hofling: ''Itzá Maya texts with a grammatical overview.'' University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City 1991. 321 pp. * Charles Andrew Hofling, Félix Fernando Tesucún: ''Tojtʼan: diccionario maya itzaj – castellano.'' Guatemala, Cholsamaj, 2000. * Charles Andrew Hofling: ''Itzaj Maya Grammar.'' The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City 2000. * Charles Andrew Hofling, Félix Fernando Tesucún: ''Itzaj Maya–Spanish–English Dictionary.'' The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City 1997.

References

External links

*
Itzaʼ-language resources at Native-languages.org

Itza vocabulary by Erik Boot hosted at FAMSI
* http://www.chichenitza.com/listingview.php?listingID=46

{{DEFAULTSORT:Itza Language Articles in class projects/Rutgers Agglutinative languages Mayan languages Mesoamerican languages Languages of Guatemala Itza Endangered Indigenous languages of the Americas