Introduction to Special Issue: Language and Dialect in the Maya Hieroglyphic Script G abrielle V ail &M artha J . M acri The Maya hieroglyphic script survives in over 2,000 texts recorded on stone, pottery, stucco, wood, bone, and shell, as well as in four bark-paper books: the Paris, Dresden, Madrid, and Grolier Codices. 1 The script spans a period of over 1,300 years, from at least 250 CE to 1566 CE, and is found in the region of the Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, the Guatemalan lowlands, and neighboring parts of Mexico and Honduras. This geographic and temporal range suggests that the hieroglyphic texts may record more than one lan- guage or dialect. The papers in this volume result from a symposium held at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Seattle, dealing with linguistic features of the texts. Participants were asked to compare these features with those of the Yucatecan and Ch’olan languages, the two subgroups of the Mayan language family with which the texts have been most closely associated. 1. This estimate of the number of glyphic texts is from the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Macri et al. n.d.), which is funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (RT21365–92, RT21608–94, PA22844–96) and the National Science Foundation (SBR9710961). Written Language and Literacy Vol. 3(1), 2000, 1–11 © John Benjamins Publishing Co.