MAYAN
Mayan languages maya1287
, spoken in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, have been extensively studied in their modern variants, in extensive colonial documentation (dictionaries and texts), in glyphic archaeological and codex records, and in reconstructed proto‑forms. Extensive documentation of modern Maya (grammars, dictionaries, comparative studies) is the result of a model effort by an Indigenous Guatemalan collective: OKMA. Typologically, and unlike other Mesoamerican languages, Maya manifests ergative‑absolutive alignment: subjects of intranstive verbs are marked and behave like objects of transitive verbs. A separate form exists for subjects of transitive verbs. Ergativity is not a recent development but has been reconstructed to proto‑Mayan.