The Chʼol (Chol) language is a member of the western branch of the Mayan language family used by the Chʼol people in the Mexican state of Chiapas. There are two main dialects:

• Chʼol of Tila spoken by 43,870 people of whom 10,000 are monolinguals in the villages of Tila, Vicente Guerrero, Chivalito and Limar in Chiapas.
• Chʼol of Tumbalá spoken by 90,000 people of whom 30,000 are monolinguals in the villages of Tumbalá, Sabanilla, Misijá, Limar, Chivalita and Vicente Guerrero.

The Cholan branch of the Mayan languages is considered to be particularly conservative and Chʼol along with its two closest relatives the Chʼortiʼ language of Guatemala and Honduras, and the Chontal Maya language of Tabasco are believed to be the modern languages that best reflect their relationship with the Classic Maya language.[2]

Chʼol-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XEXPUJ-AM, broadcasting from Xpujil, Campeche.

Morphosyntax

The basic word order is VOS. However, word order varies and VOS is not always grammatical: factors including animacy, definiteness, topicalization and focus contribute to determining which word order is appropriate.[3]

Chʼol is a split ergative language: its morphosyntactic alignment varies according to aspect. With perfective aspect, ergative-absolutive alignment is used, whereas with imperfective aspect, we rather observe nominative-accusative.[4]

Numeral classifiers are obligatorily included in noun phrases containing numerals. They occur between the numeral and the noun. The classifiers vary according to semantic properties of the noun: -tyikil is used for persons, -tyejk for trees, etc.[5]

Phonology

Below is the consonant and vowel inventory of Chʼol.[6]

Alveolar sounds [n, t] are only heard as allophones of /ɲ, ts/.

Writing system

Ch’ol relationship with Mayan glyphs

The absence of glyphic material in Guatemala points that the calendar was a creation of the lowland Maya.[2] Ch’ol has been considered one of the closer languages to several Mayan glyphs inscriptions.[10] Lounsbury suggested that the ancient Palenqueños spoke a Proto-cholean language. A certain Palenque ruler has the glyph of a Quetzal head for his name and because the word for Quetzal in Chol is kuk, it is conjectured that his name was Lord Kuk.[11] The affix Landa's I that occurs only with posterior date indicators retains resemblance with the idea of past time of Ch’ol, such in hobix 'five days hence,' hobixi 'five days ago.' As vocabularies of Ch’ol, Chontal, Chorti, and Tzotzil are far from complete, it is not possible to establish some cognates between these languages and Mayan glyphs.[2]

An alternative hypothesis developed by Houston, Robertson, and Stuart proposed that Classic Maya inscriptions between A.D. 250 and 850 convey to Eastern Ch’olan languages, more related to Chorti language than Ch’ol language.[12] However, there is no consensus around the topic.

See also

• Acala Chʼol
• Lakandon Chʼol
• Manche Chʼol

Notes

References

External links

Chʼol language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• El chʼol, website with links to unpublished scholarly work on the language
• Chol Collection of Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez and Jessica Coon at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Significant amount of audio and video recordings in Chʼol with transcriptions and Spanish translations.
• Chol Collection of Carol Rose Little at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Audio and video recordings in Chʼol with transcriptions and Spanish translations.
• Mayan Languages Collection of Victoria Bricker at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Contains a recording of a Chʼol narrative from Tila, Chiapas.
• Mayan Languages Collection of Nicholas Hopkins at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Contains many recordings in Chʼol as well as Chuj, another Mayan language.

На других языках

[de] Chol-Sprache

[es] Idioma chol

[fr] Ch'ol

[it] Lingua ch'ol

[ru] Чольский язык