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El maya yucateco o maya t’aan es una lengua mayense hablada en los estados mexicanos de Campeche, Yucatan y Quintana Roo, en los distritos belicenos de Corozal y Orange Walk, y en el Peten guatemalteco. Con mas de 800 000 hablantes es la segunda lengua nativa mas hablada en Mexico. La particularidad del yucateco, ademas de su vitalidad contemporanea, es su importante corpus documental. Los mayas peninsulares empezaron a producir textos escritos con el alfabeto latino desde los primeros anos d...

Like many indigenous populations worldwide, Yucatec Maya communities are rapidly undergoing change as they become more connected with urban centers and access to formal education, wage labour, and market goods became more accessible to their inhabitants. However, little is known about how these changes affect children’s language input. Here, we provide the first systematic assessment of the quantity, type, source, and language of the input received by 29 Yucatec Maya infants born six years apart in communities where increased contact with urban centres has resulted in a greater exposure to the dominant surrounding language, Spanish. Results show that infants from the second cohort received less directed input than infants in the first and, when directly addressed, most of their input was in Spanish. To investigate the mechanisms driving the observed patterns, we interviewed 126 adults from the communities. Against common assumptions, we showed that reductions in Mayan input did not simply result from speakers devaluing the Maya language. Instead, changes in input could be attributed to changes in childcare practices, as well as caregiver ethnotheories regarding the relative acquisition difficulty of each of the languages. Our study highlights the need for understanding the drivers of individual behaviour in the face of socio-demographic and economic changes as it is key for determining the fate of linguistic diversity.

Yucatec Maya world vision reflects an ecological dimension present in words and concepts that guide their management decisions in their traditional food production systems. Professionals working in different activities related to sustainable community development, require good understanding of agroecological concepts in Maya, especially in their interaction/conversations with local Maya people. This paper explores conspicuous ecological concepts in Maya language used in traditional systems such as the milpa and contrasts them with concepts used in academic papers related to natural resources management. The ecological/agroecological concepts analyzed are ecosystem, dynamic equilibrium, niche, competition, carrying capacity, sustainability/resilience and participatory action research. &nbsp, La cosmovisión de los Mayas Yucatecos refleja una dimensión ecológica tal y como se muestra a través de palabras y conceptos que guían el manejo de sus sistemas de producción de alimentos. Las actividades de diferentes profesionistas relacionadas con el desarrollo comunitario sostenible, en poblaciones maya-hablantes de la península de Yucatán, requieren del uso de términos ecológicos en su interacción con los pobladores. El presente trabajo hace una exploración de los términos ecológicos más conspicuos en lengua Maya, usados en contextos prácticos por maya-hablantes en sistemas tradicionales como la milpa, y los compara con el uso de esos conceptos en publicaciones académicas relacionadas con el manejo de recursos naturales. Los conceptos ecológicos/agroecológicos analizados son: ecosistema, equilibrio dinámico, nicho, competencia, capacidad de carga, sostenibilidad/resiliencia e investigación acción participativa.

This essay reviews the following works: The Ch’ol Maya of Chiapas . Edited by Karen Bassie-Sweet, with Robert M. Laughlin, Nicholas A. Hopkins, and Andres Brizuela Casimir. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 251. $45.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780806147024. Wellness beyond Words: Maya Compositions of Speech and Silence in Medical Care . By T. S. Harvey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013. Pp. vii + 256. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826352736. Maya Market Women: Power and Tradition in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala . By S. Ashley Kistler. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 160. $44.68 paperback. ISBN: 9780252079887. Southern Eastern Huastec Narratives: A Trilingual Edition . Translated and edited by Ana Kondic. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 197. $24.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780806151809. Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds: Religion and Modernity in a Transnational K’iche’ Community . By C. James MacKenzie. Boulder: University Press of Colorado; Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, 2016. Pp. ix + 368. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781607325567. Songs That Make the Road Dance: Courtship and Fertility Music of the Tz’utujil Maya . By Linda O’Brien-Rothe. Forewords by Allen J. Christenson and Sandra L. Orellana. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 244. $72.93 paperback. ISBN: 9781477305386. Language and Ethnicity among the K’ichee’ Maya . By Sergio Romero. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 123. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781607813972.

Indigenous subjects in Latin America have historically not been recognised as part of the state. When indigenous women are elected as mayors they are positioned between two places. First, they are the state as they have been democratically elected. Second, they are categorised as female indigenous bodies. This interchange of power relations influences female mayors’ decision-making. It will be argued that while some female mayors transform gender and racial norms in their municipalities, others reaffirm them. Whilst some mayors reproduce hierarchical racial-ethnic relations, others have found ways of confronting and utilising existing multicultural policies to create new relations between state and constituents such as incorporating the Maya language and customs in official municipal acts. These actions defy common multicultural practices of toleration and aim to counter the racism constituents have experienced in the past.

La autorregulación es una capacidad distintiva del ser humano. Su influencia en el desempeño del aprendizaje académico es determinante. Los alumnos que autorregulan su aprendizaje monitorizan su comportamiento en relación con sus objetivos y reflexionan sobre los avances que se van produciendo. Se orientan a un aprendizaje transformador, no puramente reproductor. Esta investigación hace una exploración del proceso de aprendizaje autorregulado en estudiantes universitarios mayahablantes. La muestra se conformó por 40 alumnos de origen maya, de los cuales el 57.5% corresponde al sexo femenino y el 42.5% al masculino. El 30% de la muestra es mayahablante y el 67.5% habla castellano. Los sujetos de la muestra de la investigación cursaban el 6o. semestre de universidad, inscritos en seis diferentes programas educativos de la Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo. Todos eran alumnos que estudiaban Lengua Maya Nivel IV. Para medir el nivel de autorregulación del aprendizaje se aplicó la escala de evaluación interactiva del proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje (EIPE-6). Los resultados indican que en el proceso de autorregulación en el aula, al relacionar las variables idioma y planificación, la correlación es significativa en el nivel 0.01 (r = -0.579) y en la autorregulación en general la correlación es significativa en el nivel 0.01 (r = -0.436). El 40% de los alumnos planifica, el 25% ejecuta lo planificado y el 45% autorreflexiona. El idioma no influye en el proceso del aprendizaje autorregulado. La autorregulación es una variable determinante para el aprendizaje transformador.

The aim of this article is to outline the new paths of the Maya language in the Yucatan Peninsula. The author identifies the linguistic and extra linguistic factors that are causing a decline in the domains of use of Maya, despite it being a very widely spoken language in Mexico. This article also reviews different stages in the history of the Maya language, in order to show how it came to be a language in frequent contact with other languages. Changes within the language and in the linguistic awareness of its speakers have led to new efforts in its revitalization and in the creation of new functional domains which may help it gain back status, it may also lead to the creation of new spaces for it to be used along with other world languages. In this process, Maya speakers, NGOs, associations, and institutes of Maya language, along with experts, researchers, and government sectors, have come together to create new paths which aim at promoting and strengthening the Maya language. However, there exist external factors which serve as obstacles to the creation of clear, pertinent, and feasible linguistic policies.

En esta investigación analizamos el sistema pronominal átono (tercera persona) de hablantes de español en contacto con maya yucateco a partir de un corpus compuesto por entrevistas y una tarea lingüística realizadas a 27 participantes, clasificados por su grado de mono/bilingüismo y nivel de instrucción. Mediante un análisis multivariado, se determinaron relaciones de dependencia entre las variables, con cruces entre variables internas y externas. Mostramos que este sistema evidencia una tendencia similar a la que constatamos en otras variedades de español en situación de contacto lingüístico intenso: las formas pronominales átonas de acusativo tienden a no especificar los rasgos de género y número. Argumentamos que al proceso de gramaticalización de las formas pronominales como concordancias de objeto que se desarrolla desde el español antiguo, se unen las características de la lengua de contacto, el maya, que actúa como un acelerador del cambio y que posibilita la reorganización y recategorización del sistema pronominal átono de tercera persona, prácticamente completada en el grupo de los bilingües consecutivos de español como L2. Y a partir de este grupo el cambio se va expandiendo al resto de los grupos, precisamente en las entidades más prototípicas de objeto (definidas, inanimadas y continuas) en contextos de alta accesibilidad, donde el referente está más activo en la mente del hablante y del oyente, In this paper we examine the atonic pronominal system (third person) of Spanish speakers in contact with Yucatec Maya. The corpus included interviews and a language task from 27 participants, who were classified according to their degree of mono/bilinguism and their education level. By means of a multivariate analysis, dependence relations between the variables, with crossings between internal and external ones, were determined. We demonstrate that this system evidences a tendency similar to the one found in other varieties of Spanish in intense language contact: the atonic pronominal forms of accusative tend not to specify the features of gender and number. We argue that along with the process of grammaticalization of the pronominal forms as object agreement, the Maya language acts as an accelerator of the change and enables the reorganization and recategorization of the atonic pronominal system of third person. This change has been completed in the consecutive bilinguals of Spanish as L2; and from this group, the change is spreading to the others displayed precisely in the most prototypical object entities (defined, inanimate and continuous), and in highly accessible contexts, where the referent is more active in the speaker and the interlocutor’s mind