The Q'eqchi' language is spoken in Belize and Guatemala. Several Maya communities in the Toledo District in Belize use this language as their first language, while the majority of Mayas in Toledo speak Q'eqchi'. In Guatemala, Q'eqchi' is spoken in the departments of Alta Verapaz, Petén, Izabal, Salama, and El Quiché. Alta Verapaz is a department in the north central part of Guatemala. ... El Petén Petén is a department of the nation of Guatemala. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... Page 9 of the Dresden Codex showing the classic Maya language written in Mayan hieroglyphs(from the 1880 Förstermann edition) Mayan languages (alternatively: Maya languages[1]) constitute a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of sounds and the human voice. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... This chart shows concisely the most common way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is applied to represent the English language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... This article is about the people of the former Maya civilization after the conquest by Spain. ... The Toledo District is the southernmost district in the nation of Belize, with the district capital in the town of Punta Gorda, Belize. ... Alta Verapaz is a department in the north central part of Guatemala. ... El Petén Petén is a department of the nation of Guatemala. ... Izabal Izabal is one of the 22 departments that make up the nation of Guatemala. ... El Quiché For other uses, see Quiché (disambiguation). ...

Q'eqchi' has traditionally been described as having two dialects — one spoken in Cobán, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala and the surrounding areas; and an "eastern" dialect spoken everywhere elsewhere.

There are several orthographies for writing Q'eqchi', but only two are in widerspread use. One was developed by two Summer Insitute of Linguistics (SIL) field researchers (Francis Eachus and Ruth Carlson) in the 1960s. SIL bibliography for Eachus and Carlson. Though this orthography is no longer considered standard, it remains in circulation in large part due to the popularity of a few texts including the Protestant Bible produced by the SIL/Wycliffe Bible Translation Project, and a widely-used language learning workbook "Aprendamos Kekchi." A newer orthography was developed by the Proyecto Lingüistico Francisco Marroquin in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This orthograhy was later modified by the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG), and is now considered the standard, official way to write Q'eqchi' (at least in Guatemala.)

In the current orthography there are 33 graphemes (letters), each of which is meant to correspond to a particular phoneme. These include separate vowels for long and short sounds, as well as glottal stops accompanying certain consonants. In typography, a grapheme is the atomic unit in written language. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

Texts

Texts produced in Q'eqchi' can be divided into three rough categories:

1) Educational texts meant to teach people how to speak, read or write Q'eqchi'. This category includes materials such as dictionaries and grammars, as well as workbooks designed to be used in rural Guatemala schools in communities where the majority of the people are native speakers of Q'eqchi'.

2) Religious texts. The Protestant version of the Bible by Eachus and Carlson Bible mentioned above is probably the most widely available text in Q'eqchi'. In the last twenty years or so, the Roman Catholic Church has been one of the primary proponents of written Q'eqchi'. Various Catholic organizations are responsible for producing a number of texts, including the New Testament, Genesis and Exodus, and various instructional pamphlets. A songbook entitled Qanimaaq Xloq'al li Qaawa' is very popular among Catholics, has been in print for many years, and is updated with new songs regularly. The Roman Catholic Church, most often spoken of simply as the Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with over one billion members. ...

3) Non-instructive secular texts have also begun to appear in the last ten years or so, although they are few in number. The most ambitious of these works have been a translation of the K'iche' text Popol Wuj ("Popol Vuh") and a collection of Q'eqchi' folk tales. A number of government documents have also been translated into Q'eqchi', including the Guatemalan Constitution. The Popol Vuh (Council Book or Book of the Community; Popol Wuj in modern Quiché spelling) is the book of scripture of the Quiché, a Kingdom of the Maya civilization in Guatemala. ...