Yucatec Maya Alphabet & Letters

Yucatec Maya, called maaya t'aan ('Maya speech') by its speakers and maya yucateco or simply maya in Spanish, is written in the Latin alphabet agreed in Mérida in 1984 and refined by later spelling norms. In its own order the letters are a, b, ch, ch', e, i, j, k, k', l, m, n, o, p, p', r, s, t, t', ts, ts', u, w, x, y and the glottal stop '. Ch, ts and every consonant with an apostrophe count as single letters, so C and H occur only inside ch, and D, F, G, Ñ, Q, V and Z turn up only in Spanish names and loanwords.

A few letters sound unlike English. x is the sh of shoe, which is why the Yucatán place names Xcaret and Xel-Há begin with an sh sound; j is a breathy h; w and y are the English sounds; ts is the ts of cats; and k is always hard, where older spellings wrote c, as in the name Chichén Itzá.

Readers who know the Maya languages of Guatemala, such as K'iche', Kaqchikel, Mam or Q'eqchi', will notice two differences: Yucatec writes ts where Guatemala writes tz, and a plain b where Guatemala writes b', because in Yucatec every b is the Maya b and needs no mark.

Long vowels and tone: what á é í ó ú mean in Maya

Yucatec Maya is a tonal language, and that is what its accent marks are for. A single vowel is short (kan, four); a doubled vowel is long (kaan, snake); and a long vowel can carry a high tone, written with an acute on its first half: áa, ée, íi, óo, úu, as in óox (three) and k'áax (forest, the wild bush). The acute never stands on a short vowel, and a long vowel without it has the low tone.

Two more vowel shapes use the apostrophe: a vowel cut off by a glottal stop (ja', water) and a vowel broken in two by one (ka'an, sky; ka'a, two). Put together, kan, kaan and ka'an are three different words, and chak (red) is not cháak (rain, the name of the rain god Chaac). This is why a Yucatec Maya text needs the five accented vowels and the apostrophe, and why they matter when you copy it.

The apostrophe in ch' k' p' t' ts': which one to use

After ch, k, p, t and ts the apostrophe marks an ejective, a consonant made with the throat closed so it comes out with a small pop: k'iin (sun, day), ts'íib (writing), p'aak (tomato). On its own it is the glottal stop, the catch in English uh-oh. Leaving it out writes a different word or no word at all.

Three characters look like it. The plain typewriter ' (U+0027) is on every keyboard and is the form many people type in messages and searches. The modifier letter apostrophe ʼ (U+02BC) is the Unicode character meant for a sound inside a word, so software keeps a word written with it in one piece. The curly ’ (U+2019) is a closing quotation mark that phones and word processors swap in by themselves. All three read the same, but to a computer ts'íib and ts’íib are different strings, so pick one and keep it through the text.

How to type the Maya accents and apostrophe

On the Latin American keyboard common in Mexico, press the dead key ´ to the right of P and then the vowel to get á é í ó ú; the straight ' has its own key to the right of 0, next to the ¿ ¡ key. On a phone, hold a vowel and slide to the accented form; the apostrophe is on the punctuation page.

On a US keyboard switch on US-International, then type ' and a vowel for á, or ' and a space for the apostrophe itself. On Windows the Alt codes are Alt+0225 á, Alt+0233 é, Alt+0237 í, Alt+0243 ó, Alt+0250 ú and Alt+0193, 0201, 0205, 0211, 0218 for the capitals; on a Mac press Option+E and then the vowel. In Word, type 02BC and Alt+X for ʼ. In HTML the codes are á and its siblings, ʼ for ʼ and ’ for ’. Or copy them from the grid above.

Where Yucatec Maya is spoken

Yucatec Maya is the language of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico 🇲🇽: the states of Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo, from the villages around Mérida and Valladolid to the towns behind the Caribbean coast, with small communities in northern Belize as well. CLDR estimates about 880,000 speakers, which makes it the second most spoken Indigenous language of Mexico after Nahuatl. Almost all speakers also use Spanish, so prices are written with the peso sign, $50, and some bilingual texts open questions and exclamations with ¿ and ¡, as the Spanish collection explains.

It belongs to the Yucatecan branch of the Maya family, together with Lacandón, Itza' and Mopán, and is a more distant cousin of the Guatemalan languages K'iche', Kaqchikel, Mam, Q'eqchi', Achi and Poqomchi', which all have their own collections. Its own written tradition is old: in the colonial period Maya scribes used Latin letters to write the Books of Chilam Balam 📜, chronicles, prophecies and almanacs in Yucatec. The Mexico collection has the country's flag, food and holiday emoji, including those for Janal Pixan 💀🕯️🌼, the Yucatec days of the dead, when families set out mucbipollo 🫔 for the souls.