Yukatek Maya (in the revised orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas, now preferred by scholars; also frequently Yucatec) is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula, northern Belize and parts of Guatemala. To native speakers, it is known only as Maya - Yukatek is a tag linguists use to distinguish it from other Mayan languages (such as K'iche' and Itza' Maya). The Yucatán Peninsula separates the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico. ... Quintana Roo is a state of Mexico, on the eastern part of the Yucatán Peninsula. ... The State of Campeche was long a part of Yucatán and shared its history through the mid 19th century. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... The Mayan languages , it has become conventional to use the form Mayan when referring to the languages, or an aspect of the language. ... 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. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... This is a concise version of the International Phonetic Alphabet for English sounds. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs correctly, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ... The Mayan languages are a family of related languages spoken from South-Eastern Mexico through northern Central America as far south as Honduras. ... The Yucatán peninsula as seen from space The Yucatán Peninsula separates the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico. ... The Kiche language (Quiché in Spanish) is a part of the Mayan language family. ... Itza (Itza, Petén Itzá Maya) is a Mayan language spoken only by a few elderly adults in communities to the north of Lake Itzá in Guatemala. ...

Yukatek Maya is written in the Latin script. This was introduced during the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan and the old Spanish orthography of that time was used (which included the use of "x" for the postalveolar fricative sound spelled "sh" in English, a sound that in Spanish has since turned into a velar fricative nowadays spelled "j", except in a few orthographic archaisms such as "México"). In colonial times a reversed "c" was often used for the sound now more usually written "dz" (/tz'/ in the revised orthography, see below). The Maya were literate in pre-Columbian times, when the language was written using Maya hieroglyphs. The language itself can be traced back to proto-Yukatekan, the ancestor of modern Yukatek, Itza, Lacandon and Mopan. Even further back, the language is ultimately related to all other Maya languages through proto-Mayan itself. The Spanish Conquest of Yucatán was a long and involved process taking some 170 years to complete. ... The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs correctly, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ... The term Pre-Columbian is used to refer to the cultures of the New World in the era before significant European influence. ... Maya glyphs in stucco at the Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico The Maya script, commonly known as Maya hieroglyphs, was the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. ...

A distinctive feature of Yukatek (and all Mayan languages) is the use of ejective consonants - /p'/, /k'/, /t'/. Often (but incorrectly) referred to as glottalized consonants, they are pronounced more or less like their non-ejective counterparts, though the pronunciation is briefly halted and then released with a characteristic popping sound. These sounds are written using an apostrophe after the letter to distinguish them from the plain consonants (e.g., t'áan speech vs. táan chest). The apostrophes indicating these sounds were not common in written Maya until the 20th century but are now becoming more common. Ejective consonants are a class of consonants which may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants in a language. ... The vocal cords, also known as vocal folds, are composed of twin infoldings of mucous membrane stretched horizontally across the human larynx. ... For the prime symbol (′) used for feet and inches, see Prime (symbol). ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999...

Yukatek is an agglutinative language, so words can end up seeming quite long (e.g., kuhatz'ikech He hits you, tuhatz'ahech He hit you). There are a great number of root words, prefixes, suffixes and affixes in Yukatek Mayan. It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ...

Like all Mayan languages, Yukatek has Verb Subject Object word order and ergative morphosyntactic alignment. That said, the obligatorily-bound pronouns on Yukatek verbs (see above) is canonically Subject Object Verb in order. Verb Subject Object—commonly used in its abbreviated form VSO—is a term in linguistic typology. ... An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. ... In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ...

In the Mexican states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo, Yukatek remains many speakers' first language today, especially in rural areas, though the language is still considered to be threatened by Spanish, which remains the only official language of Mexican government and education. In addition to universities and private institutions in Mexico, the Yukatek language is also taught in the U.S. at Harvard University, Tulane and The University of North Carolina

Cultural references to Yukatek

• Mel Gibson has filmed his upcoming movie Apocalypto in the Yukatek Maya language.