The Jacaltec (or Jakalteko or Popti') are a group of Maya Indians living in the Western Guatemala highlands and adjoining part of Chiapas and southern Mexico. The Maya peoples constitute a diverse range of the Native American peoples of southern Mexico and northern Central America. ... Chiapas is a state in the southeast of Mexico. ...

Jacaltec is also the name of their branch of the Mayan languages which is spoken by approximately 40,000 people, mainly in the Huehuetenango Department of Guatemala. It is known as Pobp’ al Ti’ to native speakers ("Jacaltec" is derived from the Nahuatl name for the people and their language). The Jacaltec language has a Verb Subject Object syntax. Like many Native American languages, Jacaltec has a lot of complex agglutinative morphology and uses ergative case. It is divided in two dialects, eastern and western Jacaltec, which are mutually intelligible in speech but not in writing. Mayan languages constitute a language family of related languages which are spoken in Mesoamerica, from southeastern Mexico to northern Central America, and as far south as Honduras. ... Huehuetenango is a department in Guatemala. ... Nahuatl is a native language of central Mexico. ... Verb Subject Object—commonly used in its abbreviated form VSO—is a term in linguistic typology. ... A Hupa man, 1923 The term indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European explorers in the 15th century, as well as many present-day ethnic groups who identify themselves with those historical peoples. ... An agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... In ergative-absolutive languages, the ergative case identifies the subject of a transitive verb. ...

Owing to Jacaltec's dissimilarity with Indo-European languages, the reasonably healthy linguistic population and the relative ease of access to Guatemala, Jacaltec has become a favorite of students of linguistic typology. Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ... Linguistic typology is the typology that classifies languages by their features. ...

The Eastern Jacaltec language includes the following phonemes: a, b, c/qu, c'/q'u, ch, ch', e, i, j, k, k', l, m, n, ŋ, o, p, r, s, t, t', tx, tx', tz, tz', u, w, x, ẍ, y, and '. In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. ...

Eastern Jacaltec is the only language besides the Malagasy language of Madagascar to make use of an n-diaeresis character in its alphabet (unless one also counts the use by the group Spinal Tap as a satire on the heavy metal umlaut). In Jacaltec the n-diaeresis represents a velar nasal consonant (ŋ). In linguistics, a, diaeresis, or dieresis (AE) (from Greek (diaerein), to divide) is the modification of a syllable by distinctly pronouncing one of its vowels. ... Spinal Tap (from left to right): Smalls, St. ... The graphic designer added the umlaut to the cover of Motörheads first album for æsthetic reasons. ... The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ...

External links

• Guatemalan languages
• Rosetta Project – Jacalteco (Eastern) page