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Yucatec Maya (''Yukatek Maya'' in the revised orthography of the ''Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala''), called ''Màaya t'àan'' (lit. "Maya speech") by its speakers, is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. Maya is the only one of the approximately 32 languages of the Mayan language family that has the proper name Maya. To native speakers, the proper name is Maya and it is known only as Maya. The qualifier "Yucatec" is a tag linguists use to distinguish it from other Mayan languages (such as K'iche' and Itza' Maya). Thus, the use of term Yucatec Maya to refer to the language is a scientific jargon or nomenclature; its use is equivalent to persons referring to English as Germanic. Yucatec Maya is incorrectly used as an ascribed ethnic, social, cultural, historical, national, racial, or civilizational term of identity or name. The use of Yucatec Maya as a term of identity is correctly used in the same way that terms such as Indo-European or Romance language speakers are used. The proper names of the Mayan languages, in contrast, tend to be the ethnic or cultural-racial names of identity. The word Mayan is, however, not an ethnic or cultural label or other term of social, political identification; Mayan, as an identity term, is an ascribed identity, not a self-identity. In the Mexican states of Yucatán, some parts of Campeche, Tabasco, Chiapas, and Quintana Roo, Maya remains many speakers' first language today, with 800,000 speakers. There are 6,000 speakers in Belize. When these speakers identify as indigenous, they identify as Maya, not Mayan. ==Phonology== A characteristic feature of Yucatec Mayan (and all Mayan languages) is the use of ejective consonants – . Often referred to as glottalized consonants, they are produced at the same place of oral articulation as their non-ejective stop counterparts – . However, the release of the lingual closure is preceded by a raising of the closed glottis to increase the air pressure in the space between the glottis and the point of closure, resulting in a release with a characteristic ''popping'' sound. These sounds are written using an apostrophe after the letter to distinguish them from the plain consonants (e.g., ''t'àan'' "speech" vs. ''táan'' "forehead"). The apostrophes indicating these sounds were not common in written Maya until the 20th century but are now becoming more common. The Mayan ''b'' is also glottalized, an implosive , and is sometimes written ''b','' though this is becoming less common. Yucatec Maya is one of only three Mayan languages to have developed tone, the others being Uspantek and one dialect of Tzotzil. Yucatec distinguishes short vowels and long vowels – indicated by single versus double letters (ii ee aa oo uu) – and between high- and low-tone long vowels. High-tone vowels begin on a high pitch and fall in phrase-final position but rise elsewhere, sometimes without much vowel length; in either case this is indicated in writing by means of an acute accent (íi ée áa óo úu). Low-tone vowels begin on a low pitch and are sustained in length; they are sometimes but not always indicated in writing by means of a grave accent (ìi èe àa òo ùu). Also, Yucatec has contrastive laryngealization (creaky voice) on long vowels, sometimes realized by means of a full intervocalic glottal stop and written as a long vowel with an apostrophe in the middle, as in the plural suffix ''-o'ob''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Yucatec Maya language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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