The Huehuetenango Sprachbund and Mayan Language Standardization in Guatemala

This paper outlines the characteristics of a Sprachbund area in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, centered around the town of Huehuetenango. Mesoamerica as a whole forms a unique linguistic area (cf. Campbell 1977, Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark 1986). The languages of the Huehuetenango Sprachbund contain many of the features typical of the Mesoamerican area, including vigesimal number systems, possessive constructions of the form her car the woman, the use of relational nouns, non-verb-final word orders, and devoicing of non-nasal sonorant coda consonants. The Huehuetenango area is unique, however, in that the languages of the region share several additional features found only in the Sprachbund area