Yucatán
This was the peninsula of Yucatán as found by Frederick Catherwood and John Lloyd Stephens during their expedition in 1839-1840 (published as Map of Yucatán in Stephens, J.L. 1843, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán. London.):
Yucatec Maya is currently spoken by 796,405 speakers in the peninsula of Yucatán, in the Mexican states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Campeche (census 2010; INEGI, 2011) , as well as by a small group of speakers (estimated 2,000) in the northern part Belize.
Yucatán is a nearly flat peninsula without significant geographical barriers such as rivers or mountains. The central, southern and eastern parts of the peninsula are covered by tropical forest that until the beginning of the 20th century was only traversed by forest trails. A different situation developed in the northwestern part of the peninsula, which was exploited for the production of henequen (sisal hemp) since the second half of the 19th century, which gave rise to labor migration and the creation of a network of roads and railway lines connecting the larger henequen fincas, the capital of Merida, and the ports for shipment (Huntington, 1912:801, 820). Up to the beginning of the 20th century, the major road connections were between Mérida and Valladolid in the north, Mérida and Campeche in the West, and Mérida and Peto in the center of the peninsula (Huntington, 1912; Redfield & Villa Rojas, 1962:3; Stephens, 1843). The Southeastern part of the peninsula (present state of Quintana Roo) was less accessible through road connections in the past and also administratively separated from the rest of the peninsula during the Caste War (1847-1933).
Atlas
How does linguistic variation evolve in geographical space? Is the language situation of indigenous American languages reflected in the patterns of variation? Does grammatical and lexical variation display spatial biases?
Our aim is to understand the sources of variation in contemporary Yucatec Maya, with a major focus on variation in geographical space. For this purpose, we created a corpus resource with data from different locations in the Yucatecan peninsula. The data was elicited with a questionnaire covering various areas of variation in this language.
Key data: 2024-12-31
The present resource provides various possibilities to explore, summarize, and visualize this data in order to answer questions about dialectal variation in Yucatec Maya. The aim of this dataset is to offer a basis for the study of variation of Yucatec Maya in geographical space. The speaker sample contains 176 native speakers from sample locations in the peninsula of Yucatán. The data was collected with Spanish prompts (either single words or complex expressions) that were part of a questionnaire with sections on lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax. The native speakers were instructed to translate the Spanish prompts into Yucatec Maya.
Locations
The data was collected in 86 locations in the peninsula of Yucatán covering all areas in which the language is currently spoken.
The gradient red values display the proportion of Yucatec Mayan speakers in the location at issue (dark red = high proportions of native speakers; light red = low proportion of native speakers), based on the data from the INEGI census 2010.
With click on the locations, you may see the exact census numbers in a popup. Total: Publication total of the location, according to census 2010; Indigenous: Number of speakers declaring that they speak an indigenous language; proportion out of population total.
Speakers
The speaker sample contains 176 speakers, who were born and lived (at least 30 years) in the sample locations. The instructors took care to interview speakers who were maximally competent in Yucatec Maya. The data were collected between 2000 and 2007.
The sample contained 117 women and 59 men. The birthyears of the speakers range between 1906 and 1989, almost normally distributed around the median 1953 (mean 1953.2)
Questions
The questions were part of a long questionnaire containing sections on Phonology, Morphonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Lexicon. The prompts were maximally simple expressions in order to elicit the material of interest and to reduce the complexity that would arise in more naturalistic contexts. Nominal concepts were translated with simple word-by-word elicitation. Further categories and grammatical formatives were elicited within minimal expressions that are potential clauses.
Difficulties in the interpretation arise when the translation between Spanish and Yucatec Maya is not one to one, which are discussed within the database (with respect to the cases at issue). In some cases in which more than one Yucatec Maya concepts correspond to the Spanish prompt, we observe geographical spaces for certain options, which is very informative for the layers of variation (and indirectly for differences in markedness asymmetries between geographical spaces).
The selected material contained elements known to vary between dialects or further instances of variation at the lexical or grammatical level that were included to be checked for geographical biases.
