Qʼeqchiʼ language

The Qʼeqchiʼ language, also spelled Kekchi, Kʼekchiʼ, or Kekchí, is one of the Mayan languages from the Quichean branch, spoken within Qʼeqchiʼ communities in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. The area where Qʼeqchiʼ is spoken spreads across northern Guatemala into southern Belize. There are also Qʼeqchiʼ speaking communities in Mexico. In Mexico, Q'eqchi' is spoken in the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Chiapas, mainly in the communities of Quetzal-Etzná and Los Laureles, in the Campeche Municipality and in Maya Tecun II and Santo Domingo Kesté in the Champotón Municipality, state of Campeche. It was calculated that the core of the Qʼeqchiʼ-speaking area in northern Guatemala extends over 24,662 square kilometers (about 9,522 square miles). The departments and specific municipalities where Qʼeqchiʼ is regularly spoken in Guatemala include: In the country of Belize, Qʼeqchiʼ is spoken in the Toledo District. Qʼeqchiʼ is the first language of many communities in the district, and the majority of Maya in Toledo speak it. Terrence Kaufman described Qʼeqchiʼ as having two principal dialect groups: the eastern and the western. The eastern group includes the varieties spoken in the municipalities of Lanquín, Chahal, Chahabón and Senahú, and the western group is spoken everywhere else. Below are the Qʼeqchiʼ phonemes, represented with the International Phonetic Alphabet. To see the official alphabet, see the chart in the Orthographies section of this article. Qʼeqchiʼ has 29 consonants, 3 of which were loaned from Spanish. Qʼeqchiʼ has 10 vowels, which differ in quality and also in length. With a few exceptions—interjections, such as uyaluy, and adjectives which have an unstressed clitic on the end—stress always falls on the final syllable. Like many other Mayan languages, Qʼeqchiʼ is an ergative–absolutive language, which means that the object of a transitive verb is grammatically treated the same way as the subject of an intransitive verb.