Mopan language

Mayan language spoken in Belize and Guatemala

Mopan (or Mopan Maya) is a language that belongs to the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan languages. It is spoken by the Mopan people who live in the Petén Department of Guatemala and in the Maya Mountains region of Belize. There are between three and four thousand Mopan speakers in Guatemala and six to eight thousand in Belize. The other Yucatecan languages are Yucatec, Lacandon, and Itzaʼ. Mopan began to diverge from the other Yucatecan languages at least one thousand years ago.

Towns where Mopan is prominently spoken include San Luis, Poptún, Melchor de Mencos, and Dolores in Guatemala, as well as San Antonio in the Toledo District of Belize.

The word order in Mopan is verb object subject (VOS), although subject verb object (SVO) is also common.

Mopan has two noun classifiers that are used to indicate gender. However, use of these classifiers is not typical of grammatical gender. The two classifiers are ix (feminine) and aj (masculine), for example, aj much, meaning "toad (masculine)". Use of these gender markers is atypical in several respects:
They are not used for most nouns. Gender is marked only in the noun and does not require agreement elsewhere in the sentence. Gender marking can sometimes be omitted. Although the gender markers normally match the natural gender of the referent when denoting people, this is not always the case for non human referents. For example, "parrot" (ix tʼutʼ) is typically feminine regardless of the sex of the animal.

Numerals in Mopan always include a numeral classifier which is added as a suffix. These classifiers indicate qualities about the referent. For example, round objects are indicated by the suffix kuul, while long, thin objects are indicated by the suffix tzʼiit. The most commonly used numeral classifiers are pʼeel, for inanimate objects, and tuul, for people and animals. In all, there are over 70 numeral classifiers used in Mopan Maya.