Yucatec Maya

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. 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'). Thus the use of the term Yucatec Maya to refer to the language is a scientific jargon or nomenclature; its use is roughly equivalent to persons referring to English as "British Anglo-Saxon".

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. These speakers identify themselves as Maya, not Yucatec Maya or Mayan.

Yucatec Maya forms part of the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan language family. The Yucatecan branch divides into the subgroups Mopan-itza and Yucatec-Lacandon, which in turn split into four languages: Itza, Mopan, Yucatec Maya, and Lacandon. All the languages in the Mayan language family are thought to originate from an ancestral language that was spoken some 5,000 years ago, known as Proto-Mayan.

Christopher Columbus traded with Maya merchants off the coast of Yucatán in 1502, but never made landfall. Arriving in Yucatán during the decade following Columbus' first contact with the Maya, the first Spanish to set foot on Yucatán soil did so by chance, the survivors of a shipwreck in Caribbean. Most of the shipwrecked men were sacrificed, leaving just two survivors. In 1519, one of these men (Gerónimo de Aguilar) accompanied Hernán Cortez to the Yucatán island of Cozumel, also taking part in the conquest of central Mexico. The other survivor (Gonzalo Guerrero) became a Mexican legend as father of the first Mestizo: by Aguilar’s account, Guerrero "went native"- he married native women, wore traditional native apparel, and even fought against the Spanish.Francisco de Montejo's military incursion of Yucatán took three generations and three wars of heavy fighting that lasted a total of 24 years.The Maya Empire, which had been around since 1500 BC, was on a stable decline when Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1517 AD. From 200 to 800 AD the Maya were thriving and making great technological advances and created a system for recording numerals and hieroglyphs that was more complex and efficient than what had come before. They migrated Northward and Eastward to the Yucatán peninsula from Palenque, Jaina, and Bonampak. In the 12th and 13th centuries, a coalition emerged in the Yucatán peninsula between three important centers, Uxmal, Chichen Uitza, and Mayapan, where they were able to grow and practice intellectual and artistic achievement during a period of peace, but then war broke out and both intellectual and artistic achievements came to end. By the 15th century Mayan Toltec fell. In the 18th century the Spanish turned the lands to large maize and cattle plantations with luxurious haciendas and exported natural resources. The Maya where subjects of the Spanish Empire from 1542 to 1821.