Mopan (or Mopan Maya) is a language that belongs to the Yucatecan branch of the

Mayan languages The Mayan languages In linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and a ...

. It is spoken by the Mopan people who live in the

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 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 in the

Maya Mountains The Maya Mountains are a mountain range located in Belize and eastern Guatemala, in Central America. Etymology The Maya Mountains were known as the ''Cockscomb'' or ''Coxcomb Mountains'' to Baymen and later Belizeans at least until the mid ...

region of

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 ...

. There are between three and four thousand Mopan speakers in Guatemala and six to eight thousand in Belize. The other Yucatecan languages are Yucatec, Lacandon, and Itzaʼ. Mopan began to diverge from the other Yucatecan languages at least one thousand years ago.

Distribution

Towns where Mopan is prominently spoken include San Luis, Poptún, Melchor de Mencos, and Dolores in Guatemala, as well as

San Antonio San Antonio ( ; Spanish for " Saint Anthony") is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Greater San Antonio. San Antonio is the third-largest metropolitan area in Texas and the 24th-largest metropolitan area in the ...

in the Toledo District of Belize.

Phonology

Consonants

The following are the consonant sounds used by the Mopan Maya language (written with the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

): In addition, some sources list (the

velar nasal The voiced velar nasal, also known as eng, engma, or agma (from Greek '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 ''E ...

) as a consonant sound in Mopan Maya.

Vowels

The following are the vowel sounds of the Mopan Maya language:

Orthography

Since the colonial period, Mopan Maya has been written with the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

. Historically, a wide range of orthographies have been used to represent the language, although recently, the orthography has been standardized by the Guatemalan Academy of Mayan Languages (ALMG). The following table shows some of the orthographies that have been used to represent Mopan Maya:

Grammar

Word order

The word order in Mopan is verb-object-subject (VOS), although subject-verb-object (SVO) is also common.

Noun classifiers

Mopan has two noun classifiers that are used to indicate gender. However, use of these classifiers is not typical of

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 two classifiers are (feminine) and (masculine), for example, , meaning "toad (masculine)". Use of these gender markers is atypical in several respects: * They are not used for most nouns. * Gender is marked only in the noun and does not require agreement elsewhere in the sentence. * Gender marking can sometimes be omitted. Although the gender markers normally match the natural gender of the referent when denoting people, this is not always the case for non-human referents. For example, "parrot" () is typically feminine regardless of the sex of the animal.

Numerals and numeral classifiers

Numerals in Mopan always include a numeral classifier which is added as a suffix. These classifiers indicate qualities about the referent. For example, round objects are indicated by the suffix , while long, thin objects are indicated by the suffix . The most commonly used numeral classifiers are , for inanimate objects, and , for people and animals. In all, there are over 70 numeral classifiers used in Mopan Maya.

Notes

References

* * * * * *

External links

Mopán Maya New Testament 2004 Edition
(archived) {{DEFAULTSORT:Mopan Language Agglutinative languages Mayan languages Indigenous languages of Central America Mesoamerican languages Languages of Belize Toledo District Languages of Guatemala Petén Department