K'iche' Alphabet & Letters

K'iche' is a Maya language of the highlands of western Guatemala, the language of the Popol Wuj and of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. Since 1987 it has been written in the unified alphabet that Guatemala made official for its Maya languages and that the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG) looks after, which gives every sound one fixed spelling. The older Spanish spelling of the name, Quiché, comes from before that reform and lives on in the department of El Quiché; K'iche' is how its speakers write it now.

In K'iche' order the letters are a, b', ch, ch', e, i, j, k, k', l, m, n, o, p, q, q', r, s, t, t', tz, tz', u, 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. V is not a K'iche' letter any more: w took its place, so the old Popol Vuh is now written Popol Wuj, and v turns up only in Spanish names and loanwords, together with D, F, G and Ñ, which the grid leaves 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, and words are usually stressed on the last syllable, so K'iche' is said roughly kee-CHEH, with a popped k and a catch in the throat at the end.

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

The apostrophe is a letter in K'iche', 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, said with the throat closed and the air drawn in, so a plain b without an apostrophe is not a K'iche' 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: ja is a house and ja' is water. The name of the language itself has two, k'i 'many' and che' 'tree', so K'iche' is usually explained as 'the land of many trees'. The same apostrophe runs through the names of the twenty Maya calendar days that K'iche' daykeepers still count, such as Iq', Aq'ab'al, Tz'i' and B'atz'.

The vowel ä in K'iche'

Spoken K'iche' tells more vowels apart than five letters can show: depending on the town, the difference is between short and long vowels or between relaxed and tense ones. Most K'iche' written today does without any marks, as in saqarik 'good morning' and maltyox 'thank you', and the five plain vowels a e i o u are all you need for school books, signs and messages.

Ä appears in some K'iche' descriptions, but the current CLDR main-letter list for the language does not include it. Where it is used, it stands for a short, central vowel close to the a of English about; most K'iche' writers, and the ALMG alphabet, simply write a plain a. The Kaqchikel alphabet next door goes further and marks all five relaxed vowels, ä ë ï ö ü.

Which apostrophe to use: ' ʼ or ’

Three characters look like the K'iche' apostrophe. The plain typewriter apostrophe ' (U+0027) is the one the ALMG prints and the one most keyboards have; 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 the name Kʼicheʼ with it. The curly ’ (U+2019) is named RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK and is also used as a typographic apostrophe; smart punctuation may insert it automatically.

All three read the same, but mixing them in one text makes search and spell-check stumble: k'iche' and k’iche’ 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 ä, the K'iche' apostrophe and ¿ ¡

Most keyboards have a key for the straight '. 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 ä, hold a on a phone and slide to ä; on a Mac press Option+U, then a; on Windows type Alt+0228 (Alt+0196 for Ä) on the number pad, or " then a on the US-International layout.

In Microsoft Word type 02BC and press Alt+X for ʼ; the curly ’ is Alt+0146 on Windows 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 ä for ä, ʼ for ʼ, ’ for ’, ¿ for ¿ and ¡ for ¡. Or copy them from the grid above.

Where the K'iche' language is spoken

The K'iche' language is spoken in Guatemala 🇬🇹, in the western highlands: the departments of El Quiché, Totonicapán, Quetzaltenango and Sololá and the lands below them toward the Pacific, with towns such as Santa Cruz del Quiché, Chichicastenango, Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango, which K'iche' speakers call Xelajú, or Xela for short. CLDR estimates about 1.6 million speakers, which places it among Guatemala's largest Maya languages; many are bilingual in Spanish, and K'iche' 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.

Its closest relatives are the other K'iche'an languages: Achi, which some linguists count as a K'iche' dialect, Kaqchikel and Tz'utujil around Lake Atitlán, and, a little further off, Q'eqchi'. Mam, spoken to the west, is a more distant member of the family. All of them share the apostrophe, which is why the Achi, Kaqchikel, Q'eqchi' and Mam collections look so much like this one.