Judith Maxwell* Kib’eyal taq ch’ab’äl: Mayan language regimes in Guatemala DOI 10.1515/ijsl-2017-0015 Abstract: Having survived a 36-year genocidal war, as well as 500 years of colonial and neocolonial domination, the Maya of Guatemala have developed strong and explicit strategies to maintain their languages and to define their own language communities. In this article, I explore how these language ideol- ogies have changed over time from precontact interactions, colonial and repub- lican eras into the early 1930s, through the violence of the civil war, into a period of paragovernmental interaction, and finally into a dichotomous era of standardization/revitalization and language shift. I explore the dynamic ten- sions between the national promotion of Mayan languages, through the Ministry of Education and the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala, and the neoliberal regime’s emphasis on economic advancement and social simplification. These national trends are compared with more local grassroots language movements, their ideologies, and language regimes. Keywords: Mayan languages, revitalization, identity politics, language ideology 1 Indigenous polities, languages and prestige Before the Spanish invasion of Guatemala, the linguistic landscape was a mosaic. In the early 1500s, there were around twenty non-totally distinct Mayan languages, Xinca, Nahuat and Nahuatl. The relative prestige of the languages reflected political and economic power. Ch’olan had been the lan- guage of the Mayan political elites in the lowlands during the Classic Period (250–900 CE). At the time of contact, Yucatec and its close cousins Mopán and Itzaj inhabited the Lowland Maya centers; elites conserved some knowledge of the glyphic writing systems. They and the Ch’olan daughter languages retained some of the mystique of their ancestral knowledge systems. Colonies of Nahuat speakers along the Pacific coastal plains and in El Salvador maintained trade ties with the Aztec empire, as did many of the Highland Mayan groups. *Corresponding author: Judith Maxwell, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA, E-mail: maxwell@tulane.edu IJSL 2017; 246: 109–133 Brought to you by | Cornell University Library Authenticated Download Date | 6/13/17 2:59 PM