More than Mistakes: Grammatical Errors and Sociolinguistic Identity in a Colonial-Era K’iche’ Maya Manuscript MALLORY E. MATSUMOTO Brown University Abstract. Research on documents composed by Maya communities during the mid-sixteenth to seventeenth centuries has been largely limited to basic transcriptions, translations, and ethnohistorical analysis, particularly for those whose textual contents are political in nature. This analysis focuses instead on grammatical errors in a Spanish-language título from the K’iche’ Maya region of the western Guatemalan Highlands. I argue that the patterned gender and number disagreement indicates that the scribe was a native K’iche’ speaker who was not fully bilingual in Spanish. This case study illustrates the socio- linguistic potential of colonial-era indigenous sources when examined from a paleographic and linguistic perspective. 1. Títulos in colonial Highland Guatemala. In the generations after the Spanish-led incursion into Mesoamerica and the establishment of the colonial government in the early sixteenth century, local indigenous communities com- posed títulos (Spanish ‘titles’) to record local history and politics, communicate collective memory, and maintain and forge group identity in the newly minted colonial society (Florescano 2002:221; e.g., Matsumoto 2016; Megged 2009). Most títulos record the affairs of indigenous elites, as their frequent citation of the protagonists’ local and Spanish titles indicates. Their typically legal con- tents assert the protagonists’ rights to a particular sociopolitical position or to specific property. Yet títulos represent a class of documents more diverse than simple records of noble status or “land titles” (Carmack 1973:19; Quiroa 2011: 295; see also Florescano 2002:215—26). Although they do frequently address issues of territorial possessions, títulos may also narrate a native dance drama, like the Título K’oyoi (see Carmack 1973:21; Carmack and Mondloch 2009), recount a community’s mythic origin, as does the Título de Ilocab (see Carmack and Mondloch 1985), or record dynastic or genealogical succession, like the Títulos Tamub’ and Zapotitlán (see Carmack 1973:31, 42). All Mesoamerican títulos were composed in Spanish or an indigenous lan- guage, yet frequent codeswitching and use of loanwords allude to the intensive cultural and linguistic contact between both indigenous and European popula- tions (e.g., Karttunen 1998:434). Although most, if not all, títulos were originally composed in their community’s native language, many were eventually trans- lated into Spanish (e.g., Carmack 1973:33—70, though, cf. p. 60). This process is most perceptible in rare survivals of both indigenous-language and Spanish versions of the same text into the present (e.g., Utitulo ulew; Matsumoto 2017: 1