Who speaks Mayan?

There are thirty-some Mayan langages in use today. These are  not dialects, but separate languages that can be traced back about 4,000 years to a single language that has been reconstructed and called Proto-Mayan. This language  may have begun in the mountains of northwest Guatemala and, as time went on, diverged into dialects and finally separate languages.

Out of the eight million Mayas throughout south-eastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, hundreds of thousands live on the Yucatan Peninsula and speak at least some of their "mother tongue," mostly Yucatec Maya commonly called "Maya" in that area.
MAJOR MAYAN LANGUAGE GROUPS
(Approximate Distribution)
Yucatecan
Yucatecan
Cholan
Huastecan
Motozintlec
Motozintlec
Kekchian
These words and their spelling may not be accurate or, in some cases, equivalent to each other because the major source* used phonetic interpretations only. Whenever the source indicated whether the word is for cock, hen, wild, or domestic turkey, the word for cock and/or domestic has been listed here.

*Dienhart, John M., The Mayan Languages--A Comparative Vocabulary, electronic version, Odense University, 1997.
Confusing Spelling?!

In addition to the complexity of so many Mayan languages, there is another factor which must be dealt with in learning about the languages, that of different spelling conventions. There are two basic orthographies; each with its own variants, sometimes referred to as "Colonial" and "Modern." Those interested in studying the language will need to become familiar with both since the earlier Colonial writings are indispensable and the more recent Modern efforts toward standardization will hopefully eliminate confusion in the future.

In Guatemala, the Mayas have worked out this problem by adopting a uniform alphabet that can be used on all of their languages.  The Guatemalan Ministry of Culture and Sports adopted this alphabet in 1989  and published Acerca de la alfabetos para escribir los idiomas Maya de Guatemala by Margarita Lopez Raquec as the official government documentation of the new alphabet and the history of its development.
"We [Linda Schele and Peter Matthews] have used this alphabet throughout this book with one exception. We have used h instead of j, because j is very often mispronounced by English speakers. We have applied the alphabet uniformly, including to the names of people and places, both ancient and modern, that occur in any of the Maya languages. We have retained traditional spellings when names derive from Nahuatl or Spanish, so that Olmec, Toltec, Aztec, and Zinacantan remain the same."
Syntax

In all languages, in addition to grammar, there  is a characteristic word order in sentence construction illustrated simply here by the relation of the Subject, Verb, and Object. In English, that order is Subject-Verb-Object or SVO i.e., "The farmer grows corn."   In Mayan languages, that order would more likely be VOS or  "Grows corn the farmer." The verb-first order is
applied to both transitive (as above)
and intransitive verb, i.e. "Sleeps the
farmer." Adjectives always precede
the noun, as in "Grows yellow corn
the happy farmer."
This new standard orthography has been adopted by Engilish-speaking countries with very few alterations.

Linda Schele and Peter Matthews in The Code of Kings explain their use of the Guatemalan standard:
CHAAK
Incense
Burner from
Mayapan.
(Photo by
Irmgard Groth)
Last updated June 10, 2007
m.monts
On this web site, "h" is not substituted for "j," with the view that doing so defeats the purpose of having a single uniform orthography to promote yet another variant.This orthographic convention applied to Yucatec/Yukatek Maya is displayed on its own page.  See Spelling Conventions.