In the Yucatán, in the south-east of Mexico, the Spanish of its inhabitants is very peculiar. When a Yucatecan wants to talk about their grandmother, they refer to their chichí (ending in a tilde, being careful not to confuse it with the word chichi, which denotes a woman’s breasts in central Mexico). When a Yucatecan is scared, they’re likely to oh, waay! say what in contrast to the expression oh, güey! used in the rest of the country, a wáay is a magician, spirit, or spectrum in the imagination of this peninsula.
More than 750,000 people inhabiting the Yucatan Peninsula speak a variant of the Mayan language known as Peninsular Maya in addition to Spanish, and although it is not the most widely spoken form when translated into the Spanish language, it is it is usually very peculiar both in its pronunciation and in its morphology. “Every language has five levels,” explains Tomás Pérez Suárez, researcher at the Center for Mayan Studies of the Philological Research Institute of the UNAM, in an interview. “First the lexicon, which is the inventory of words, then the morphological, how words are formed, followed by syntax, which relates to the way we arrange words, then come the phonological and semantic levels, and that is undoubtedly so on the phonological level, where the Yucatecans gain more ground and differ from the Castilians,” he points out.
And it sounds that way because it’s a direct legacy of an ancient culture. The influence of the Yucatec Maya variant on the Spanish spoken by the Peninsulars comes from the alphabet itself, since there are no letters like F or G and on the other hand graphemes like K run in different tones and the X sounds more like -sh, like in aluxe (pronounced alushe) and refers to a dwarf mythical creature, similar to the elves of European culture.
Although the contributions of the Maya culture in the fields of mathematics and astronomy are recognized worldwide, in the case of language, few words have made it into the Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the Royal Spanish Academy. For example, the verb anolar, which simply means “to gnaw, to suck,” but is used daily by the Yucatecans.
Other Maya terms are widely accepted. Miguel Güemez Pineda, author of the Diccionario del español yucateco, explains that the word cacao to name the tree and its seed came from the Maya kakaw, but was Nahuatlized with the suffix -atl. “Some words refer to geomorphological features such as cenote, from the Mayan Tz’onot, which is good, abyss and adapted to Spanish phonetics, or they refer to geographical phenomena: akalché, swamp or beetle insects like maquech,” points out to the Yucatecan writer.
But the speakers borrowed a variety of concepts from Mayan culture. The term Wáay also refers to a legend widely known in the states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Campeche known as the legend of the Waay Goat, a demonic entity with the head of a goat that stalks residents at sunset after she was wrongly beheaded. for a mob
Other words refer to gastronomy, as Güemez Pineda explains, like the famous dish cochinita pibil. Pibil comes from pib “to roast underground” and is a food wrapped in banana leaves and cooked underground, on a grill or baked, or salbut, which comes from zaal, meaning “light” but “stuffing”. , and is described as a corn tortilla, a type of boat as defined by the author.
Although there are phonetic peculiarities that make the Spanish spoken in the Yucatan Peninsula unique and that undoubtedly continue to relate to the flavors of its cuisine and its worldview. “For example, to make lime soup, you ask for chuchú limes that pretend to have nipples because chuchú is a woman’s breast,” says Pérez Suárez.
The interest in the Maya culture attracts attention above all, of those who visit cities as colorful as Mérida, Izamal or Progreso. Of course, the vocabulary of its inhabitants often leaves more than one foreigner or stranger confused: central or northern Mexicans totally ignorant of the Peninsula Maya-derived words. “The Maya culture continues to be a source of impressive wealth because it is undoubtedly one of the most stubborn peoples, it is a living culture in constant transformation,” says the UNAM academic. “Of the Mesoamerican cultures, the Mayan culture is without a doubt the largest in terms of revenue,” he concludes.
They commissioned me to do this card and in the end they didn’t pay me for it. So I share them.
Map of the main indigenous languages in the south-east of the country. pic.twitter.com/pJSHLAJoEp— Adrian (@ElenoAM) January 24, 2023
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