The archive
Yucatec Maya
Made of, not shaped like
A Mayan language whose grammar makes you name the material of a thing every time you count it.
ScriptLatin
Speakers800k
Weeks to a working levelNot on the FSI scale. Around 800,000 speakers in the Yucatán peninsula.
- Counting requires a classifier, and the classifier names what the thing is made of rather than what shape it is.
- Asked which of two objects matches a cardboard box, English speakers pick the one with the same shape and Yucatec speakers pick the one made of the same stuff.
- The effect is smaller in young children and grows as the grammar is learned, which is the argument that language is doing the work rather than culture.
- It is tonal, which is unusual among Mayan languages.
- It has around 800,000 speakers and is one of the healthier indigenous languages in the Americas.
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Yucatec Maya with.
The Yucatec Maya Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in Yucatec Maya
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.