The Mayan language family is a group of 69 related languages spoken today by over 6 million people in Central America. These languages are thought to have originated from a common ancestral language spoken at least 5,000 years ago by inhabitants of the Mayan empire whose remains can be found throughout much of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and southern Mexico. The empire flourished for many hundreds of years from 1,500 BC, but collapsed during the period 800-900 AD. Among the better known ruins of the Mayan Empire are Tikal, Uxmal and Chichen Itza.

Today, the largest populations of Maya speakers can be found in the Mexican states of Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and Chiapas, and in the Central American countries of Belize, Guatemala, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador.

Status
Although Spanish is the official language of all Central American countries (except for Belize, where it is English), many Mayan languages are still spoken today as first or second languages by over six million indigenous people. The table below lists the main branches, their member languages, number of speakers, and geographical distribution. In recent years, the names of some Mayan languages have been changed in order to more accurately represent their pronunciations and to remove the Spanish spelling patterns imposed on their orthographies by earlier missionaries. The alternate spellings are given in parentheses.

Although still spoken by relatively large populations, Mayan languages show signs of language shift (i.e., replacement by Spanish) and decline because the children in many communities are no longer learning the language. At the same time, Mayas are participating in a language revitalization movement which will hopefully result in preventing further decline of these languages.

Writing
The pre-Columbian Maya civilization developed a writing system that represented the language of the Maya people spoken at that time, which is known today as Classical Maya. The Maya writing system is known as the Maya hieroglyphics. It contains a syllabary and logograms. Most historical inscriptions of any length were written in a combination of syllabics and logograms. It was essentially a logosyllabic system consisting of a highly elaborate set of symbols painted on ceramics, walls, or bark-paper, carved in wood or stone, or molded in stucco.

The earliest identifiable Mayan inscriptions date back to the 1st century BC. The script was in continuous use up until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century AD. There were many documents written in Maya hieroglyphics at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Yucatán in the 16th century, but they were destroyed by the conquistadors and priests, particularly those in the Yucatán. As a result, our knowledge of the ancient Maya is very fragmentary since of the thousands of books destroyed, only four have survived. Knowledge of the writing system was lost, probably by the end of the 16th century. Renewed interest in it was sparked by published accounts of Maya ruins in the 19th century.

The decipherment of the Maya writing was a long and laborious process. 19th and early 20th century investigators managed to decode Maya numbers and portions of the text related to astronomy and the Maya calendar, but understanding of most of the rest long eluded scholars. While the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs has been advancing rapidly in the past few decades, differing opinions as to whether or not Maya writing consisted of logographs (word-pictures) or of symbols representing sounds of the language. Finally, in the mid-twentieth century, Tatiana Proskouriakova, a Russian Mayanist, demonstrated that the Maya hieroglyphics were a fully functional system comprised of close to 800 symbols, each representing a syllable consisting of a consonant and one of the five vowels: i, e, a, o, u. Here is an example from Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: if a Maya scribe wanted to write the word tz'ib "writing," he could select from these signs to convey the sounds, e.g.,

tz'i +	b'i	= tz'ib'

Click here to see the Mayan syllabary.

Today, all Mayan languages are written with adapted versions of the Roman alphabet that still reflect the spelling patterns of Spanish, although there are efforts to revise the orthographies so that they more closely represent the sounds of the Mayan languages.

Mayan words in English
These Maya words came into English by way of Spanish

Maya language and culture study resources
Yamada Language Center - Mayan Languages Guide
University of Southern Denmark Maya Guide
Mayan Language Family
Wikipedia -- Classic Maya Language
Wikipedia - Mayan Languages
Languages of Middle America
Maya Civilization
Maya Hieroglyphic Writing