Mayan Alphabet and Orthography

Through Government Accord 1046–87, published in the Diario Oficial on 30 November 1987, the Guatemalan government made official the Unified Alphabets for the Mayan Languages of Guatemala. This accord invalidated the 1950 decree regarding Mayan alphabets; it also superseded various other alphabets authorized by the Instituto Indigenista Nacional in 1962, 1966, and 1975. The Unified Alphabets were made official to reduce the ambiguities and confusion of multiple written forms.

The Mayan languages of Mesoamerica had an early written tradition. The Classic lowland Maya used a complex writing system based on icono-graphic and morphophonemic glyphs that survive in stone and ceramics. There is no evidence of a writing system in the Postclassic Guatemalan highlands; bark paper codices from Yucatán are the only record of Maya writing in the Postclassic period.

The Spanish missionaries who came to Guatemala following the Conquest in 1524 propagated Christian doctrine and recorded some Mayan ethnohistoric and cultural accounts, as well as native language vocabularies, in an accommodated Latin alphabet. The Popol Vuh and the Memorial de Tecpán Atitlán are two examples of transcribed narratives using Latin characters.

In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, little was written in or about the Mayan languages. Noteworthy works of this period include Brasseur De Bourbourg's Dictionnaire, grammaire et chrestomathie de la langue maya (1862) and Otto Stoll's Zur Ethnographie der Republik Guatemala (1884). These early works used an orthography congruent with their authors' own linguistic orientations.

It was not until 1949, at the First Congress of Linguists, that systematic alphabets were first proposed for the four majority Mayan languages of Guatemala. These were made official and published in 1950 as Alfabeto para los cuatro idiomas indígenas mayoritarios de Guatemala: Quiché, cakchiquel, mam y kekchí. The 1950 official alphabets, like all those approved by the Instituto Indigenista Nacional during the next several decades, were developed largely by foreign linguists and missionaries. These alphabets imposed conventions of Spanish in order to standardize Mayan orthography and facilitate the transfer of literacy skills from Spanish to the vernacular languages.

Despite the existence of official alphabets since 1950, institutions and individuals working in the Mayan languages tended to develop and disseminate Mayan-language materials in different alphabets. Most adhered to Spanish orthography; only the alphabet of Adrián Chávez to write K'iche' (1967) and that of the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín (1976) made concerted efforts to avoid the overt imposition of Spanish orthographic conventions on the Mayan-language writing systems.

The 1987 Mayan-language alphabet was proposed at the first seminar of the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala. At this seminar, Mayan-language speakers and linguists moved to adopt a common core alphabet to write the Mayan languages of Guatemala. The criteria were that the alphabets be systematic, phonemic, and accessible, and that they promote Mayan literacy, reduce dialect differences, and affirm the cultural identity of the Maya.

At the seminar, nine graphemes—those at the center of the alphabet controversy—were approved to represent phonemes common to the Mayan languages: b′, k, k′, q, q′, ch′, t′, tz′, ′. At later regional meetings the remaining graphemes were selected and accommodated to the specific languages.

The phonemic alphabets approved by Government Accord 1046–87 recognize twenty-seven letters shared by the twenty-one Mayan languages of Guatemala, and an additional twenty-six letters used to represent sounds distinctive to specific languages or language groups. Glottalized stops are marked with an apostrophe; no distinctive symbols are used to distinguish whether they are implosive or explosive. Long vowels are represented as digraphs (vv) and relaxed vowels are marked with diaeresis (v̈).

As an important element of culture and symbol of ethnic pride, the Mayan movement and communities have struggled for the languages' official recognition. In addition to recognizing the alphabet, in 1991 the Mayan Language Academy of Guatemala (ALMG) became a federal institution. With the adoption of the Peace Accords, the government made further commitments to indigenous languages. In 1997 a Committee for the Officialization of Mayan Languages was created, and projects aimed at standardization at the written and spoken levels continue. Elementary school materials are available in both Spanish and Mayan languages. Yet in a 1998 referendum on constitutional reforms, Guatemalans voted not to make the more than twenty Mayan languages official. Spanish remains Guatemala's official language. However, in May 2003 the congress issued a decree called the Law of National Languages, which guaranteed rights and provisions for Mayan, Xinca, and Garifuna languages. Disagreements about vowel use in the orthography persist.

See alsoMayan Epigraphy .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A comprehensive study of the Mayan glyphs, including an important discussion of the verb morphology and syntax of the Mayan writing system, is in Linda Schele and David Freidel, Forest of Kings (1990). Lyle Campbell discusses the orthographic conventions employed by the early missionaries in "Quichean Linguistics and Philology" in Word Anthropology: Approaches to Language, edited by William C. McCormack and Stephen A. Wurm (1978). For a discussion of the 1949 First Congress of Linguists and the 1950 official Mayan alphabets, see Julia Becker Richards, "The First Congress of Mayan Language of Guatemala," in The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: The "First Congress" Phenomenon, edited by Joshua Fishman (1992). The general topic of Mayan language alphabets is reviewed by Terrence Kaufman in Proyecto de alfabetos y ortografía para escribir las lenguas mayances (1976); and Margarita López Raquec, Acerca de los alfabetos para escribir los idiomas mayas de Guatemala (1989).

Additional Bibliography

Brody, Michal. The Fixed Word, the Moving Tongue: Variation in Written Yucatec Maya and the Meandering Evolution toward Unified Norms. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2004.

Coe, Michael D., and Mark Van Stone. Reading the Maya Glyphs, 2nd edition. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

Garzon, Susan, et al. The Life of Our Language: Kaqchikel Maya Maintenance, Shift, and Revitalization. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Guatemala. Ley de idiomas nacionales: Decreto 19–2003. Guatemala: Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, 2003.

Guatemala. Oficialización de los idiomas indígenas de Guatemala: Propuesta de modalidad (resumen). Guatemala: Proyecto Q'anil B, 1999.

Marcos Méndez, Esperanza. Kanwiʾkon ka pejkiʾk y ka tzʾijbʾiʾk tama e jun ira. Guatemala: Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, 1995.

Montgomery, John. Dictionary of Maya Hieroglyphs. New York: Hippocrene Books, 2002.

Montgomery, John. How to Read Maya Hieroglyphs. New York: Hippocrene Books, 2002.

                                Julia Becker Richards