Mayan phonology

This article provides an overview of the phonology of Mayan languages. The principal aim is to describe the commonalities and differences between phonological systems in the Mayan family. I have also tried to highlight some phonological patterns which are interesting from a typological or theoretical perspective. There are many intriguing aspects of Mayan phonology which remain understudied; I’ve noted a handful of such phenomena here, with the hope that other researchers will take up these fascinating and difficult questions. Apart from phonology proper, this article also touches on the phonetics and morphosyntax of Mayan languages (see also Coon this volume). Most work on Mayan phonology has focused on basic phonetic description and phonemic analysis. A much smaller portion of the literature deals directly with phonotactics, alternations, prosody, morpho-phonology, or quantitative phonetics. Since phonology connects with all of these topics, I have tried to be as thematically inclusive as possible given the current state of research on Mayan sound patterns. The phonemic systems of Mayan languages are comparatively well-studied, thanks to the efforts of numerous Mayan and non-Mayan scholars. This article has drawn heavily on grammatical descriptions published by the Proyecto Lingǘıstico Francisco Marroqúın (PLFM), Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’ib’ (OKMA), and the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG); many of these works were written by native-speaker linguists. Other important sources include the various dissertations written on Mayan languages from the 1960s onward, as well as overviews like England (1988, 1992, 2001), Kaufman (1990), Garćıa Ixmatá et al. (1993), and Law (2011, 2014). Many of these resources are in Spanish, though certainly not all. There is a certain bias in this article toward the Eastern Mayan languages, and to a lesser extent, languages of the Q’anjob’alan branch. This is a consequence of two factors. First, these languages have some of the best-described phonologies of the family (though other languages, such as Yucatec, have also been the subject of substantial phonological study).