lingvoj.org

Linked Languages Resources

Western Kanjobal

knj

Search languages

Powered by Freebase

Akatek is a Mayan language spoken by the Akatek people primarily in the Huehuetenango Department, Guatemala in and around the municipalities of Concepción Huista, Nentón, San Miguel Acatán, San Rafael La Independencia and San Sebastián Coatán. A number of speakers also live in Chiapas, Mexico. It is a living language with 58,600 speakers as of 1998, of which 48,500 lived in Guatemala and the remaining in Mexico. Akatek is closely related to the two Mayan languages, Q'anjob'al and Jakaltek. The three languages together form the Q'anjob'al-Jakaltek sub-branch, which together with the Mocho' language form the Q'anjob'alan sub-branch, which again, together with the Chujean languages, Chuj and Tojolab'al, form the branch Q'anjobalan–Chujean. It is believed that Q'anjob'al–Jakaltek split into Akatek, Q'anjob'al and Jakaltek some 500 to 1,500 years ago. Akatek was regarded as a dialect of the Q'anjob'al language until the 1970s, when linguists realized that it has a distinct grammar from that of Q'anjob'al. That it has been thought a dialect of Q'anjob'al is reflected in the many names Akatek has had through time. One of its primary names before it was named Akatek was Western Q'anjob'al, but it has also been called Conob and various names including Q'anjob'al and the municipality where it is spoken. An interesting aspect of Akatek grammar, which is also present in most other Q'anjobalan languages, is the use of directional morphemes, which appear as enclitics. These morphemes make it possible for the speaker to talk about movement and direction in space without pointing or using other gestures. Consider the stative verb [ʔej ʔej] to be, which can appear as [ʔejʔok ʔejʔok] existing inwards, [ʔejtok ʔejtok] existing towards there, away from the speaker and listener and [ʔeːltox ʔeːltox] existing from the inside out, using different enclitics.
Source : DBpedia

Names (more)

Technical notes

This page is providing structured data for the language Western Kanjobal.
Following BCP 47 the recommended tag for this language is knj.

This page is marked up using RDFa, schema.org, and other linked open vocabularies. The raw RDF data can be extracted using the W3C RDFa Distiller.

Freebase search uses the Freebase API, based on ISO 639-3 codes shared by Freebase language records.

ISO 639 Codes

Linked Data URIs

Sources