Kekchí language

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Kekchí

Spoken in

Guatemala , El Salvador and Belize
speaker over 700,000
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639-3

kek

Kekchi also Ketchi , Q'eqchi ' , Quecchí , Cacché is a Mayan language by mainly indigenous of Kekchi -Ethnie in Guatemala (departments of Alta Verapaz and Petén ), El Salvador (immigrants of recent decades) and Belize ( Toledo District ) is spoken.

Number of speakers

In the 2002 census, 716,101 (7.0%) people stated Q'eqchi 'as their mother tongue, making it the second most widely spoken indigenous language in Guatemala after Quiché ; 852,012 (7.6%) called themselves Q'eqchi ' .

According to SIL International , there were 400,000 Kekchí speakers in Guatemala in 1998 , 11,200 in Belize in 2006, and 12,300 in El Salvador.

history

At the time of the Conquista , Kekchí was probably spoken by fewer people than the neighboring languages ​​of Itzá , Mopan and Choltí , which today only have a small number of speakers or are threatened with extinction. This is supported by the fact that numerous loanwords have found their way into the Kekchí language from these languages. An important factor that Kekchí has ​​held up so well in comparison to these languages ​​is its geographical isolation in a mountainous area. Unlike the Choltí , who were quickly subjugated by the Spanish military, or the Itzá , who were also defeated after 200 years of successful resistance, the Kekchí came to terms with Spanish rule after initial military resistance by placing Dominican priests under the direction of Bartolomé de las Casas let into the country, while the Spaniards in return did not allow non-clergy to enter. The province was given the Spanish name Verapaz (“true peace”), and that is how the two Guatemalan departments are still called Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz . The language was able to consolidate and expand so that the Kekchí were able to maintain their ethnic and linguistic identity despite the expropriation of indigenous communal land under the liberals in the late 19th century and the massacres under the military governments of the 20th century. As a result of the expansion of the language during the colonial period, the Kekchí is also probably the most homogeneous major Maya language.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier: Sociolinguistics. An international handbook of the science of Language and Society. Vol. 3, 2006, p. 2078.
  2. ↑ XI Censo Nacional de Población y VI de Habitación (Censo 2002) - Idioma o lengua en que aprendió a hablar ( Memento of September 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ). Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2002 (Spanish).
  3. ↑ XI Censo Nacional de Población y VI de Habitación (Censo 2002) - Pertenencia de grupo étnico ( Memento of February 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive ). Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2002 (Spanish).
  4. ↑ Q'eqchi '. In: Ethnologue. Retrieved March 17, 2016 .
  5. ^ Søren Wichmann, Kerry Hull: Loanwords in Q'eqchi ', a Mayan language of Guatemala. Preprint (PDF file; 504 kB) .