Chʼoltiʼ is a dead language belonging to the Ch’olan branch of the Mayan family of languages. It was spoken in Belize and Guatemala prior to its extinction in the late eighteenth century. It and its sister Chʼortiʼ language are now deemed likely (or likeliest) descendants of Classic Mayan, the language represented in Mayan hieroglyphic writing.

Classification

The inclusion of Ch’olti’ within the Eastern Ch’olan, Ch’olan, Ch’olan–Tseltalan, Western Mayan, and Core Mayan families is ‘the most widely accepted classification’ as of 2017.

History

The common ancestor of all Ch’olan languages, thought to have been in use throughout the southern Maya Lowlands since at least circa 200 BC, is believed to have split into Eastern and Western Ch’olan at about AD 600, with Eastern Ch’olan finally diversifying into Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ possibly around AD 1500. By the time of Spanish contact, Ch’olti’ was almost certainly spoken in the Manche Ch’ol Territory, and possibly also in some neighbouring polities. The later Spanish conquest of Peten would bring about the extinction of the language in the late eighteenth century, making Ch’olti’ one of only two Mayan languages not extant as of 2017.

Study

The colonial variant of Ch’olti’ is known only from an ethnolinguistic manuscript by Francisco Morán, a Dominican friar who drafted the text during his entradas to the former Manche Ch’ol Territory between 1685 and 1695. Recently, Ch’olti’ has become of particular interest to the epigraphic study of Mayan hieroglyphs, since it seems certain that most of the glyphic texts are written in an ancestral form of one or more of the Ch’olan languages.

Notes and references

Explanatory footnotes

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