Today, more than 30 Mayan languages exist and are spoken by at least six million people worldwide. Although some, like Chicomuseltec and Choltí, have disappeared or are close to extinction, others, like K’iche’, Yucatec and Q’eqchi, have around a million speakers each. They all come from the same language, Proto-Mayan, spoken before about 2000 BCE. They are now so different from one another that speakers of Mam, which has around half a million speakers, can’t understand K’iche’, and Yucatecans can’t understand Mam.
For nearly 2,000 years, Mayan languages had their own writing system, known as Classic Maya. Composed of hieroglyphs, it was only used by those at the top of the social pyramid. “If we want to make a historical equivalency, we can compare Classic Maya to Latin,” says Genner Llanes-Ortiz, a Maya scholar at Bishop’s University in Canada. “It was a prestige language. It was spoken by the elites, while the rest of the population spoke their own language that, little by little, mixed with Latin. We continue to speak our languages and use them not just to write our history, but to write new ways to deal with what affects us.”
The Spanish missionaries deemed hieroglyphs pagan, and systematically purged them. The sons and daughters of the Mayan elites were forced to abandon hieroglyphic writing and learn to use the Latin alphabet, and most of the books written by that time, known as codices, were destroyed. But the oral languages were tolerated, and under a new robe – the Latin alphabet – have survived until the present day. “The use of Mayan languages was so common and widespread during colonial times that community acts, balance sheets, wills, political declarations, and memorials were all written in them, but everything was in Latin characters that remain in the archives of the city of Seville,” says Llanes-Ortiz. “Even after Mexico’s independence from Spain, Mayan languages continued to be used as lingua franca throughout the Yucatán Peninsula.”
Western scholars began to study the Mayan hieroglyphs, long suppressed by the Spanish, in the 19th Century. While American and Russian linguists made significant progress in deciphering them throughout the 20th Century, Llanes-Ortiz says that huge breakthroughs were reached in the 2000s when Mayan scholars and speakers were included in the conversation. It was then that researchers understood that hieroglyphs represented not just complex concepts but also syllables forming words. The involvement of native speakers has advanced the study of Mayan languages (imagine that), while inspiring a new generation of Mayans to reclaim hieroglyphic writing. Groups like Ch’okwoj or Chíikulal Úuchben Ts’íib are hosting workshops, and making t-shirts and mugs using ancient Mayan glyphs to resuscitate them and transmit them to future generations.
Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are taking their ancient languages to new territories. The rise of these indigenous languages in Latin American immigrant communities in the U.S. is only beginning to be fully understood, experts say – and has important implications for the communities and their needs. The San Francisco metropolitan area is one of the top destinations for Latin American immigrants. One in four of the Bay Area’s more than seven million residents are Latinos, most with roots in Mexico and Central America, according to calculations based on U.S. Census Bureau data. The U.S. government counts them all as Hispanic upon entering the country, even though for some of these migrants Spanish is not their mother tongue. Others don’t even speak Spanish at all, and only speak their indigenous language. “Many Mam speakers come to the U.S. and have a different set of needs, experiences and histories than monolingual Spanish speakers and those not from indigenous cultures,” says Tessa Scott, a linguist specialising in the Mam language at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you call everyone from Guatemala ‘Hispanic’, you might assume everyone in that group speaks Spanish fluently, and they don’t.” In California, a new law passed in 2024 requires state agencies to collect more detailed data on Latin American immigrants’ preferred languages, including indigenous languages such as K’iche’ and Mam, in order to better understand and meet their needs.
Mayans and other indigenous immigrants face unique challenges that mestizo or white Latin Americans don’t, and that often go unnoticed when all are covered under the blanket term “Hispanic”, Scott says. “Indigenous Guatemalans, many from Mayan cultures like Mam, frequently face intense discrimination and violence by people in a different social category, and this is what often drives them to come to the U.S., where they may seek asylum,” she says. Labelling all Latin Americans as Hispanic can hide these complex social, cultural and ethnic hierarchies, and prevent asylum seekers from receiving specialist services such as legal help and trauma support, she adds.
The growth of Mayan communities in the U.S. has also given their ancient languages new platforms, adding to a long and rich history. Though the ruins and carved hieroglyphs of ancient Mayan cities may seem like relics of a long-lost civilisation, many Mayan communities survived the Spanish conquest of the 16th Century and preserved their culture and languages. In places like the Bay Area, you can now find Mayan languages on the radio, in local news outlets or even in classrooms.
I thought that, in this day and age of immigrant phobia, stoked by political myopia and racism, this story gives us reassurance that the U.S. will continue to benefit, and enjoy, the input of its traditional life-blood, immigrant populations! May Mayan languages continue to enrich our national language, as English has always incorporated aspects of almost all languages it has touched and also enrich our lives with the experience of other cultures. In the case of Mayan culture, for example, it has become increasingly obvious in the last few decades that the indigenous Latin American cultures were well advanced…and the Spanish were the barbarians!
