Q'eqchi' language
| Q'eqchi' | |
|---|---|
| Kekchi | |
| Native to | Guatemala, Belize |
| Region | Alta Verapaz, Petén, Izabal, Baja Verapaz, El Quiché; Toledo |
| Ethnicity | Q'eqchi' |
|
Native speakers
|
800,000 (2009) |
|
Mayan
|
|
| Latin | |
| Official status | |
|
Official language in
|
(national language of Guatemala) |
| Regulated by | Academía de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | kekc1242 |
The Q'eqchi' language, also spelled Kekchi, K'ekchi', or kekchí, is one of the Mayan languages, spoken within Q'eqchi' communities in Guatemala and Belize.
The area where Q'eqchi' is spoken spreads across northern Guatemala into southern Belize. There are also some Q'eqchi' speaking communities in Mexico.
It was calculated that the core of the Q'eqchi' speaking area in northern Guatemala extends over 24,662 square kilometers (about 9,522 square miles). The departments and specific municipalities where Q'eqchi' is regularly spoken in Guatemala include:
In the country of Belize, Q'eqchi' is spoken in the Toledo District. Q'eqchi' is the first language of many communities in the district, and the majority of Maya in Toledo speak it.
Terrence Kaufman described Q'eqchi' as having two principle dialect groups: the eastern and the western. The eastern group includes the varieties spoken in the municipalities of Lanquín, Chahal, Chahabón and Senahú, and the western group is spoken everywhere else.
Below are the Q'eqchi' phonemes, represented with the International Phonetic Alphabet. To see the official alphabet, see the chart in the Orthographies section of this article.
Q'eqchi' has 29 consonants, 3 of which were loaned from Spanish.
Q'eqchi' has 12 vowels, which differ in quality and also in length.
With a few exceptions—interjections, such as uyaluy, and adjectives which have an unstressed clitic on the end—stress always falls on the final syllable.
Like many other Mayan languages, Q'eqchi' is an ergative–absolutive language, which means that the object of a transitive verb is grammatically treated the same way as the subject of an intransitive verb. Individual morphemes and morpheme-by-morpheme glosses in this section are given in IPA, while "full words," or orthographic forms, are given in the ALMG orthography.
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