🗣️Yucatec Maya for English speakers

1. Yucatec Maya and its world

Yucatec Maya — maayaʼ tʼaan to its speakers — is a Mayan language of the Yucatán Peninsula, spoken across the Mexican states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Campeche and into northern Belize. Its ISO 639-3 code is yua and its Glottocode is yuca1254.¹ Speakers do not usually call it “Yucatec” — that qualifier is scholarly nomenclature, added by linguists to distinguish it from Kʼicheʼ, Itzaʼ and the other thirty-odd Mayan languages. In Maya they say maayaʼ or maayaʼ tʼaan; in Spanish, simply el maya.²

Mexico's 2020 INEGI census recorded 774,755 speakers, down from 795,499 in 2010 — a decline of about 20,744 over the decade.³ That still makes Maya one of the two largest indigenous languages of Mexico alongside Nahuatl, at roughly 10.5% of all indigenous-language speakers in the country. Belize recorded a further 2,518 speakers at its 2010 census.²

Its vitality is assessed three different ways by three different bodies, and the disagreement is instructive rather than embarrassing.³ Glottolog's AES rating is not endangered. The Endangered Languages Project rates it at risk, at 20% certainty. Ethnologue calls it a stable indigenous language, learned by all in the ethnic community. The census decline supports the more cautious reading at the margins. What is not in doubt is that this is a living language of three-quarters of a million people, not a museum piece — and in December 2019 the Congress of Yucatán voted unanimously to require Maya teaching in the state's schools.²

Why learn Yucatec Maya as an English speaker

• It is the living language of the region whose ruins — Chichén Itzá, Uxmal — millions of people visit without hearing a word of it spoken.
• It is typologically fascinating: verb-initial, ergative in its person marking, and with no grammatical tense at all.
• It is one of only three Mayan languages to have developed contrastive tone, which makes it unusual within its own family.²
• It is exceptionally well documented for an indigenous American language — continuous Latin-script attestation since the sixteenth century, colonial grammars and dictionaries, a modern official orthography, and free scholarly resources online.

What to expect from this guide

Three things will be genuinely new. The ejective consonants written with an apostrophe. The four vowel shapes, which combine length, tone and phonation into a single four-way contrast on every vowel quality. And the absence of tense — Yucatec encodes time through aspect, lexical aktionsart and inference, and it does not even have words for “before” and “after”.² This guide teaches the modern INALI orthography, which is what schools and current publications use.

2. Sounds and spelling

Start with the consonants, because one series has no English equivalent at all. Yucatec has ejectives — /pʼ tʼ kʼ/ and the affricates tsʼ and chʼ — made at the same place as the plain stops, but with the closed glottis raised to compress the air between glottis and closure, so the release has a characteristic popping sound.² They are written with an apostrophe after the letter, and the contrast is real: tʼàan ‘speech’ versus táan ‘forehead’.

The letter b is also glottalised — it is an implosive /ɓ/, sometimes written bʼ though that is now less common.² And note that the plain stops are not aspirated: Bricker is explicit that stops which are not glottalised are “articulated with lung air without aspiration as in English spill, skill, still”.⁴ An English speaker's default aspirated /p t k/ is therefore wrong in both directions — too breathy for the plain series, not popping enough for the ejective one.

Consonants that need attention

The four vowel shapes

Yucatec has a plain five-vowel system — a e i o u — but each quality comes in four shapes, combining length, tone and phonation.² This is the single most important thing on the page, and it is why the diacritics in the deck are not decoration.

The four vowel shapes

Two consequences. First, tone is contrastive — Yucatec is one of only three Mayan languages to have developed it, the others being Uspantek and one dialect of Tzotzil.² Second, the fourth shape can neutralise: in fast speech the creaky long vowels may be pronounced like plain long high ones, so kaʼan ‘sky’ and káan ‘when?’ can sound identical.² Context carries the difference, exactly as it does for English homophones.

Stress is simple: the earliest syllable containing a long vowel takes it; if there is no long vowel, stress falls on the last syllable. Loanwords from Spanish or Nahuatl often keep their original stress.²

One morphophonological rule will otherwise confuse you when reading. Yucatec avoids geminate consonants by debuccalising — a word-final glottalised plosive before an identical consonant may lose its place of articulation and become a glottal stop, and other final consonants become /h/.² This is why the language name appears written variously as mayaʼ tʼaan, maya tʼaan and mayab tʼàan: [majaɓˈtʼàːn] becomes [majaʔˈtʼàːn]. It is one word, spelled according to what the speaker actually said.

3. First words

Core first vocabulary

Maʼalob is worth singling out: it is both the adjective ‘good’ and the adverb ‘well’, and it is the everyday answer to “how are you?” across the peninsula. Maʼ on its own is the negator ‘not’.

Pronouns

Yucatec has independent pronouns, used for emphasis and in equational sentences, alongside the bound person markers that do most of the grammatical work (section 6).

Independent pronouns

Notice -oʼob on letiʼob: that is the general plural suffix, and it is a good early example of the creaky vowel shape from section 2. It attaches to nouns too — the deck's entries were harvested with those plural forms stripped out, because baʼaloʼob ‘things’ teaches you nothing that baʼal ‘thing’ plus the suffix does not.

Question words

High-frequency function words

Practice reader — A1 story: In wotoch (My house)

This passage is a constructed teaching text, assembled for this guide rather than quoted from a published source. It uses only the habitual ku frame and the vocabulary of sections 1–3, and its content words are on this guide's 351-card deck; everything else is glossed below. It is deliberately repetitive — that is what a graded reader at this level should be.

Teen in kʼaabaʼ Maria. Maʼalob. Teen jach kiʼimak in wóol. In yuum ku meyaj teʼ kool. In naʼ ku meyaj teʼ otoch. Teen in wotoch jach chichan, baʼaleʼ jach maʼalob.

Teʼ otoch yan jaʼ. Yan janal. Yan waaj yéetel ixiʼim. In naʼ ku beetik waaj sáamal sáamal. Jach kiʼ le waajoʼ. Teen kin jaantik waaj yéetel jaʼ. In yuum ku yukʼik kʼáaj jaʼ.

In wíitsʼin kʼaabaʼ Pedro. Letiʼ jach chichan. Letiʼ ku báaxal yéetel u peekʼ. In kiik kʼaabaʼ Ana. Letiʼ ku xokik juʼun. Teen kin tsʼíibtik juʼun xan. Toʼon kin xokik yéetel kin tsʼíibtik teʼ otoch.

Bejlaʼeʼ jach kʼiin. Yan kʼáakʼ teʼ kʼáax. Yan chʼíichʼ. Yan péepen. Teen kin wilik le chʼíichʼoʼ. Jach jatsʼuts. Maʼalob le kʼiinoʼ. Teen kin bin teʼ kool yéetel in yuum.

Translation. My name is Maria. Good. I am very happy. My father works in the cornfield. My mother works at home. My house is very small, but it is very good. — There is water at home. There is food. There is tortilla and maize. My mother makes tortillas every day. The tortillas are very tasty. I eat tortillas with water. My father drinks beer. — My younger sibling is called Pedro. He is very small. He plays with his dog. My older sister is called Ana. She reads books. I write books too. We read and write at home. — Today is very sunny. There is fire in the forest. There are birds. There are butterflies. I see the bird. It is very beautiful. The day is good. I am going to the cornfield with my father.

Reader glossary — forms not on the flashcard deck

A note on this reader's length. It runs to about 700 characters of Yucatec, not the 1,200 this project's house style asks for. That is deliberate. Extending it would mean composing subordinate clauses and temporal linking that the sources consulted for this guide do not attest — and Yucatec is a language that famously lacks the connectives ‘before’ and ‘after’ altogether.² A shorter reader that is defensible line by line is worth more than a long one that is partly invented. See section 14 for the full statement of this guide's limits.

4. The vigesimal numeral system

Yucatec counts in twenties, not tens, and the system is one of the most satisfying things in the language. The unit is the kʼáal, a score.⁵

One to twenty

Eleven to nineteen are transparently “n + ten”: óox-lajun is 13, bolon-lajun 19. Then the base changes. Twenty is junkʼáal, one score; forty is kaʼakʼáal, two score; a hundred is joʼokʼáal, five score; two hundred is lajunkʼáal, ten score.⁵

The higher units

The word for thirty is the one to notice: lajun tu kaʼakʼáal, “ten into the second score”. Counting is not additive from the completed score below but subtractive-forward into the score above — you are ten of the way through the second twenty. Anyone who has met the Maya Long Count will recognise the same architecture: kʼáal 20, baakʼ 400, pik 8,000.⁵

5. Verb first

Like almost all Mayan languages, Yucatec is verb-initial. Word order varies between VOS and VSO, with VOS the more common.² Many sentences will look SVO to an English speaker, but that is a topic–comment structure — the fronted element is a topic, much as in Japanese, not a grammatical subject in the English sense.²

This matters practically: when you meet a Yucatec sentence, look for the verb first, and treat anything before it as topicalised material. The definite frame le … -oʼ wrapping a noun is a strong signal that the noun is being set up as a topic.

Yucatec's core-argument marking is a fluid-S system in Dixon's typology: the subject of an intransitive clause is encoded like an agent or like a patient depending on semantic properties and on whether the event is perfective.⁶ In practice this means the person marker you use on an intransitive verb is not fixed by the verb alone — it shifts with aspect. Section 6 sets out the two marker series that make this work.

6. Set A and Set B

Yucatec marks person with two series of affixes, which Mayanists conventionally call Set A and Set B. Set A markers are prefixes; they mark the possessor of a noun and the agent of a transitive verb. Set B markers are suffixes; they mark the patient. This split is what makes the language ergative in its person marking.

The two marker series at work

One spelling rule you have already met in the reader: a Set A marker ending in a vowel takes a linking w- before a vowel-initial stem. In + otoch gives in wotoch ‘my house’, and in + íitsʼin gives in wíitsʼin. This is regular and you should expect it.

7. Aspect, not tense

Yucatec Maya has no grammatical category of tense.² Temporal information is carried by a combination of aspect marking, the inherent lexical aspect of the verb (aktionsart), and pragmatically governed inference. It is in the same typological company as Chinese and Kalaallisut. The language is also unusual in lacking temporal connectives corresponding to ‘before’ and ‘after’ — a fact worth sitting with, because it means Yucatec narrative does not sequence events the way English narrative does.²

What it has instead is a rich set of aspectual frames. The paradigm below is for the transitive verb het ‘to open (something)’, and it is reproduced from the description in the Wikipedia article, which follows the traditional grammars.² Read the left column as “phase”, not “tense”.

Transitive aspect paradigm: het ‘to open (something)’

Now the same verb used intransitively. Notice that the person marking moves to a suffix — this is the ergative split in action:²

Intransitive aspect paradigm

Compare the two imperatives. Transitive hete ‘open it!’ ends in the vowel that carries the object; intransitive heten ‘open!’ takes the Set B suffix -en that also appears in heten ‘I opened’. The same suffix, two jobs, disambiguated by the frame.

The verb kim shows the pattern with a different aktionsart — it is inherently a change-of-state verb, so its transitive form is causative:²

kim: transitive (causative) versus intransitive

The -s- in kimsik is the causative: kim ‘die’ plus -s gives ‘cause to die, kill’. It is the same element in hetsʼel ‘be opened’ and in nahkúuns ‘to support’ from section 2's debuccalisation example. Once you see it, causatives stop being vocabulary and start being grammar.

Practice reader — A2 story: Teʼ kʼíiwik (At the market)

A second constructed teaching text. It puts the vigesimal numerals of section 4 to work in the one place every learner meets them — haggling — and keeps to the habitual ku frame throughout. Content words are on the deck; the rest is glossed below.

Teʼ kaaj yan junkʼáal otoch. Yan xan jun naj kʼuj. Bejlaʼeʼ kin bin teʼ kʼíiwik. In naʼ ku bin xan. Toʼon kin bin yéetel.

Teʼ kʼíiwik yan yaʼab baʼal. Yan pʼaak. Yan pakʼaal. Yan jaʼas. Yan kay. Yan waaj. Yan kakaw. In naʼ ku manik joʼ pʼaak yéetel lajun jeʼ. Kin manik óox jaʼas. Jach kiʼ le jaʼasoʼ.

Le koʼoleloʼ ku konik kay. Kin kʼáatik: “Bahux le kayoʼ?” Ku núukik: “Junkʼáal.” Jach koʼoj. Kin kʼáatik kaʼah: “Lajun?” Ku cheʼej. “Maʼalob,” ku yaʼalik.

Kin bin teʼ otoch yéetel in naʼ. Kin jaantik waaj yéetel kay. Kin wukʼik jaʼ. Bejlaʼeʼ jach maʼalob. Sáamal kin bin teʼ kʼíiwik kaʼah.

Translation. There are twenty houses in the town. There is also a temple. Today I am going to the market. My mother is going too. We are going together. — There are many things at the market. There are tomatoes. There are oranges. There are bananas. There is fish. There is tortilla. There is cacao. My mother buys five tomatoes and ten eggs. I buy three bananas. The bananas are very tasty. — That woman sells fish. I ask: “How much is the fish?” She answers: “Twenty.” That is very expensive. I ask again: “Ten?” She laughs. “All right,” she says. — I go home with my mother. I eat tortilla with fish. I drink water. Today is very good. Tomorrow I am going to the market again.

Reader glossary

Practice reader — B1 story: Le kéejoʼ (The deer)

A constructed teaching text that moves out of the habitual frame and into the past, so you can watch the t-u … -ah transitive past of section 7 doing real narrative work. It also introduces the numeral classifiers túul (animate) and péel (inanimate), which Yucatec requires when counting and which the deck does not teach. Everything not on the deck is glossed below.

Úuchij, jun túul xiib kʼaabaʼ Pedro. Kuxlaj teʼ kaaj naatsʼ tiʼ le kʼáaxoʼ. Yan u kool. Sáamal sáamal ku bin teʼ kool. Ku pakʼik ixiʼim. Ku pakʼik kʼúum xan.

Jun péel kʼiin, tu yilah jun túul kéej teʼ kʼáax. Le kéejoʼ jach nojoch. Pedro maʼ tu kíinsah. Tu yilah chéen. Tu tuklah: “Le kéejoʼ ku kuxtal teʼ kʼáax, je bix teen kin kuxtal teʼ kaajoʼ.”

Tu paktah le kéejoʼ. Le kéejoʼ tu paktah Pedro xan. Kaʼah bin le kéejoʼ teʼ kʼáax. Pedro bin teʼ otoch. Tu tsikbaltah tiʼ u paalal.

Bejlaʼeʼ u paalal ku tsikbaltikoʼob le tsikbaloʼ tiʼ u paalaloʼob xan. Le tsikbaloʼ ku kuxtal. Le kéejoʼ kimi, Pedro kimi xan, baʼaleʼ le tsikbaloʼ maʼ kimi.

Translation. Long ago, there was a man called Pedro. He lived in a town near the forest. He had a cornfield. Every day he went to the cornfield. He planted maize. He planted squash too. — One day, he saw a deer in the forest. The deer was very big. Pedro did not kill it. He only looked. He thought: “That deer lives in the forest, just as I live in the town.” — He looked at the deer. The deer looked at Pedro too. Then the deer went into the forest. Pedro went home. He told the story to his children. — Today his children tell that story to their children too. The story lives on. The deer died, Pedro died too, but the story did not die.

Reader glossary

8. Orthography, old and new

The Maya were literate long before contact, writing with the Maya script — the hieroglyphic system that records Classic-period Mayan and that was only fully deciphered in the late twentieth century.² Yucatec today is written in the Latin alphabet, introduced during the Spanish conquest of Yucatán from the early sixteenth century, using the Spanish orthographic conventions of that period.

Those conventions are why modern Yucatec looks the way it does. x spells /ʃ/, because sixteenth-century Spanish x had that value — the same reason México is spelled as it is. In colonial texts a “reversed c”, ⟨ɔ⟩, was used for the alveolar ejective affricate /tsʼ/.²

Three orthographic traditions

This guide and its deck follow the INALI 2014 norm, which is the Mexican official standard and what schools use, and which is also the spelling the deck's kaikki.org source adopts.⁷¹⁰ The practical consequence for a learner: dictionaries and colonial sources will spell the same word several ways, and you need to be able to read through the spelling to the word. ɔunuun, tzʼunuʼun and tsʼunuʼun are all ‘hummingbird’.

Note also that INALI writes no accent for low tone, where some academic sources use a grave accent (ìi èe àa òo ùu).² A word written with no accent on a long vowel in INALI spelling is therefore low tone by default, not toneless. This is the single most common misreading of modern Yucatec text.

9. Dialects and variation

Yucatec is comparatively homogeneous across the peninsula — a traveller from Mérida can talk to a speaker in Quintana Roo without difficulty. Local variation shows up mostly in vocabulary and in the realisation of the vowel shapes. The Hocabá dictionary compiled by Victoria Bricker documents one town's usage in detail, including the local variant name mayab tʼàan, literally ‘flat speech’ — a nickname that appears to be unique to Hocabá and is not the recognised name of the language elsewhere.⁴

Be careful with one popular etymology. Mayab is sometimes explained as ma yaʼab ‘not many, the few’. That derivation is false, and it comes from New Age spiritualist interpretations of the Maya rather than from any linguistic source.² It circulates widely on the internet; do not repeat it.

Yucatec belongs to the Yucatecan branch of Mayan, which divides into Mopan-Itza and Yucatec-Lacandon.² Its closest relatives are Itzaʼ, Lacandon and Mopan. All Mayan languages descend from Proto-Mayan, spoken roughly 5,000 years ago.

10. What English speakers get wrong

• Aspirating the plain stops. Yucatec /p t k/ are unaspirated, as in English spill, skill, still — not as in pill, kill, till.⁴
• Skipping the ejectives. tʼaan and táan are different words. The apostrophe is a letter, not punctuation.
• Treating b as English b. It is implosive /ɓ/.
• Ignoring tone. Long vowels carry high or low tone contrastively; INALI's unaccented long vowel means low, not none.
• Collapsing the four vowel shapes into two. Short, long-low, long-high and creaky are four distinct things, and kaʼan ‘sky’ is not káan ‘when?’ however similar they sound at speed.
• Reading x as English x. It is /ʃ/ — xook is “shoke”.
• Looking for the subject first. The verb comes first; fronted material is topic.
• Hunting for tense. There isn't any. Learn the aspect frames as whole units.
• Expecting ‘before’ and ‘after’. Yucatec does not have them; it sequences events differently.²
• Using colonial spellings. ⟨ɔ⟩ and unmarked ⟨h⟩ belong to sixteenth-century texts, not to a modern conversation.

11. Books, media and culture in Yucatec Maya

Yucatec has an unusual media profile for an indigenous American language: a continuous written tradition since the sixteenth century, three state radio stations, a telenovela, and appearances in two globally distributed films.

Reading

• The Songs of Dzitbalché — an eighteenth-century manuscript of Yucatec ritual poetry, one of the very few surviving collections of pre-conquest-derived Maya verse. John Curl's Ancient American Poets is the accessible English edition.
• The Books of Chilam Balam — the community chronicles kept in Yucatec in Latin script from the colonial period, and the central corpus of colonial Maya literature.
• Bolles, Combined Dictionary–Concordance of the Yucatecan Mayan Language and A Grammar of the Yucatecan Mayan Language — both free online through FAMSI, and the most useful reference pair a learner can have.⁸
• Bricker, Poʼot Yah & Dzul de Poʼot, A Dictionary of the Maya Language as Spoken in Hocabá (University of Utah Press, 1998) — the standard modern dictionary.⁴
• Barrera Vásquez, Diccionario maya (Porrúa) — the large Maya–Spanish, Spanish–Maya dictionary.
• The New World Translation was released in Maya in 2019, in print and online, distributed without charge — a substantial free modern parallel text.²

Watching and listening

• Radio — the CDI stations XEPET-AM (Peto, Yucatán), XENKA-AM (Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo) and XEXPUJ-AM (Xpujil, Campeche) carry Yucatec-language programming.² This is the single best source of natural spoken Maya for a learner outside the peninsula.
• Baktun (2013) — billed as the first Mayan-language telenovela.²
• Apocalypto (2006) — filmed entirely in Yucatec Maya, with the script translated by Hilario Chi Canul of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who also coached the cast. Watch it for the language; historians are considerably less kind about the history.²
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) — the underwater kingdom of Talokan and its king speak Yucatec Maya, which put the language in front of a global audience.²
• Jesús Pat Chablé — often credited as one of the first Maya-language rappers and producers, and the entry point to a live Maya-language hip-hop scene.²

Archives and courses

• AILLA, the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, holds the Bricker Mayan Languages Collection (714 files — Caste War histories, legends, astronomical and medical lore, autobiographies, conversations and songs), the Frazier collection of 60 narrative recordings, and others.
• The Yucatec Maya DoReCo corpus, compiled by Stavros Skopeteas — narrative audio with phone-level time-aligned transcription and translation. The best resource in existence for hearing the vowel shapes.
• Yucatec is taught at the University of North Carolina, Chicago, Harvard, Tulane, Indiana, Wisconsin–Madison, Leiden and INALCO Paris, as well as at Mexican institutions.

• Glottolog 5.3 — Yucatec Maya (yuca1254) — Classification, ISO code, and links onward to WALS, PHOIBLE and Grambank.
• Wikipedia — Yucatec Maya language — Phonology, the four vowel shapes, tone, word order, the tenseless aspect system and the full paradigms.
• Bolles — A Grammar of the Yucatecan Mayan Language (FAMSI) — Free online reference grammar. The natural next step after this guide.
• Bolles — Combined Dictionary–Concordance of the Yucatecan Mayan Language — Free online dictionary and concordance.
• Yucatec Maya DoReCo corpus — Narrative audio with phone-level time-aligned transcription — the best listening resource available.
• Bricker Mayan Languages Collection at AILLA — 714 archival files of recordings and transcriptions in Yucatec, Tzotzil and Chʼol.
• kaikki.org — Yucatec Maya machine-readable dictionary — The source of this guide's 351-term vocabulary deck.

12. Where the language goes deepest

Three things separate a competent learner of Yucatec from someone who has the language whole.

The first is the aspect system as a way of seeing. A language with no tense does not merely omit tense — it organises time differently. Yucatec speakers locate events through aspect, the inherent character of the verb, and inference from context, and they do it without the connectives ‘before’ and ‘after’ that English narrative leans on constantly.² Translating English tense into Yucatec aspect frame by frame produces grammatical sentences that no one would say.

The second is the colonial archive. Yucatec has written records kept by Maya notaries in Latin script from 1557 to 1851, now held in libraries in Mexico, Spain and the United States. Reading them requires the colonial orthography, a feel for Maya reducido — the semantically reshaped variety the missionaries engineered for evangelisation, and which Maya writers then appropriated for their own purposes — and patience.⁹ It is one of the richest indigenous-language archives in the Americas.

The third is knowing whose language it is. Yucatec is spoken by communities with a long and specific history of being written about, filmed and interpreted by outsiders. The false ma yaʼab etymology in section 9 is a small example of a large pattern. A learner who arrives with the language and without that awareness will still get a great deal wrong.

13. Where this guide's facts come from

Classification and codes come from Glottolog.¹ Speaker figures and the three diverging vitality assessments come from the in-repo research dossier, which captured them from Glottolog, the Endangered Languages Project and Ethnologue.³ Phonology — the ejective series, the implosive b, the unaspirated plain stops, the five vowel qualities and four vowel shapes, tone, stress and the debuccalisation rule — together with word order, the fluid-S analysis, the tenseless aspect system, the full transitive and intransitive paradigms, orthographic history and the media and culture material all come from the English Wikipedia article on the Yucatec Maya language, retrieved 5 August 2026.² Bricker is cited directly for the aspiration statement and the Hocabá material,⁴ Dixon for the fluid-S typology,⁶ Hanks for Maya reducido,⁹ and Bolles for the free online grammar and dictionary.⁸ Numerals come from the deck's kaikki.org harvest.⁵ The orthographic norm is INALI's.⁷

Known limits, stated plainly. The vocabulary deck is REFERENCE tier: it is harvested from Wiktionary via kaikki.org and has not been cross-checked page by page against Bolles, Bricker or the INALI norm document. The dossier's two-independent-source standard for a phoneme inventory is not met here — PHOIBLE and a primary description have not been read at page level — so section 2 is a practical orientation rather than a phonemic analysis. The four graded readers are constructed teaching texts, they are shorter than this project's 1,200-character house target, and the A1 reader says so in its own framing note; extending them would have required inventing subordination the sources do not attest. The aspect paradigms are reproduced from a secondary source that follows the traditional grammars and use an older transcription (tzʼ, hēn) rather than INALI spelling — they are presented as they were found. And no part of this guide has been reviewed by a Yucatec Maya speaker. Corrections are welcome and will be credited.