Achi Alphabet & Letters

Achi is a Maya language of the K'iche' branch, spoken in Baja Verapaz in Guatemala. It is written in the unified alphabet that Guatemala made official for its Maya languages in 1987 and that the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG) now looks after; it gives every sound one fixed spelling. You need no accented letter at all: the whole language fits on an ordinary keyboard.

In Achi's own alphabetical order the letters are a, aa, b', ch, ch', e, ee, i, ii, j, k, k', l, m, n, o, oo, p, q, q', r, s, t, t', tz, tz', u, uu, w, x, y and the glottal stop '. So ch and tz count as single letters, and so does every consonant with an apostrophe. C, H and Z never appear on their own; they live only inside ch and tz. D, F, G, V and Ñ turn up only in Spanish names and loanwords, which is why the grid above leaves them out.

Some letters do not sound the way Spanish or English readers expect. x is the sh of English shoe; j is the throaty sound of Spanish j; w is the English w; tz is the ts of cats; and q is a k made further back in the throat, a sound English does not have. Q is never followed by a silent u as in Spanish que.

What the apostrophe does in b' ch' k' q' t' tz'

The apostrophe is a letter in Achi, not decoration. After ch k q t tz it marks an ejective: the throat closes, the air in the mouth is squeezed, and the consonant comes out with a small pop. After b it marks the Maya b, made with the throat closed and the air drawn inward, so a plain b without an apostrophe is not an Achi letter. On its own, between vowels or at the end of a word, ' is the glottal stop, the catch in the middle of English uh-oh.

Because it is a sound, leaving it out writes a different word. In K'iche', Achi's closest relative, ja is a house and ja' is water, and the same apostrophe runs through the names of the Maya calendar days, such as Iq', Aq'ab'al, Tz'i' and B'atz'. The language names of the region show it too: K'iche', Q'eqchi', Tz'utujil, Poqomchi'.

Which apostrophe to use: ' ʼ or ’

Three characters look like the Achi apostrophe. The plain typewriter apostrophe ' (U+0027) is the one the ALMG prints and the one every keyboard has; it is the safe choice for school work, messages and anything people will search for. The modifier letter apostrophe ʼ (U+02BC) is the Unicode character meant for a glottal stop inside a word, so software treats a word written with it as one word; CLDR, the data behind the language names on phones and computers, spells K'iche' as Kʼicheʼ with it. The curly ’ (U+2019) is really a closing quotation mark, which phones and word processors swap in automatically.

All three read the same, but mixing them in one text makes search and spell-check stumble: tz'i' and tz’i’ are two different strings to a computer. Pick one and keep it, and if you want the straight ', switch off "smart quotes" or "smart punctuation" in your word processor or phone settings.

How to type the Achi apostrophe and ¿ ¡

The straight ' has a key of its own on every keyboard. On the Latin American layout common in Guatemala it sits to the right of 0, next to the ¿ ¡ key; on a US keyboard it is next to Enter; on phones it is on the punctuation page.

For the other two: in Microsoft Word type 02BC and press Alt+X for ʼ; the curly ’ is Alt+0146 on the Windows number pad and Option+Shift+] on a Mac. On a US keyboard ¿ is Alt+0191 and ¡ Alt+0161, or Option+Shift+? and Option+1 on a Mac. In HTML the codes are ʼ for ʼ, ’ for ’, ¿ for ¿ and ¡ for ¡. Or copy them from the grid above.

Where the Achi language is spoken

The Achi language is spoken in Guatemala 🇬🇹, in the department of Baja Verapaz, around the towns of Rabinal, Cubulco, San Miguel Chicaj and Salamá. CLDR estimates about 200,000 speakers, many of whom also speak Spanish; Achi texts often borrow the Spanish opening marks ¿ and ¡. Money is the Guatemalan quetzal, written with a plain Q before the amount, Q50; the Guatemala collection has the country's flag, food and other emoji.

Achi is so close to K'iche' that some linguists class it as a K'iche' dialect, but Guatemala recognises it as one of its 22 Maya languages, and its speakers call themselves Achi. Its neighbours in the Verapaces are Q'eqchi' and Poqomchi', and the wider family includes Kaqchikel and Mam; each has its own collection, and the apostrophe works the same way in all of them. The best-known work in the language is the Rabinal Achí 🎭, a masked dance drama from before the Spanish conquest, played to a wooden slit drum and long trumpets 🥁🎺 and listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.