Nueva Maya

El Castillo, Chichen Itza, Yucatán, Mexico · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

A reformed Latin orthography for Yucatec Maya — designed to preserve all phonemic distinctions of the ALMG 1984 standard while eliminating the apostrophe character entirely, making the language fully ASCII-compatible for digital use.

The problem with current ALMG orthography

The 1984 ALMG standard uses apostrophes to mark ejective consonants and glottal stops: k', t', ch', ts', p', and the saltillo '. This creates practical problems:

• apostrophe conflicts with SQL, Python strings, URLs, and filenames
• difficult to type on standard keyboards
• legal name systems often reject the character
• inconsistent rendering across fonts and platforms

The Nueva Maya solution

Six substitutions, zero apostrophes, 100% phonemic parity:

IPA	ALMG 1984	Nueva Maya	Notes
/pʼ/	p'	f	/f/ absent in native Maya
/tʼ/	t'	d	/d/ absent in native Maya
/kʼ/	k'	g	/g/ absent in native Maya
/t͡ʃʼ/	ch'	c	/c/ unused in ALMG
/t͡sʼ/	ts'	dz	restores colonial orthography
/ʔ/	' (saltillo)	h	/h/ freed up since j covers /χ/

All other characters remain identical to ALMG 1984. The conversion is fully reversible and automatable.

Quick comparison

ALMG 1984: maayaʼ tʼàan k'iin ch'iich' ts'ak Nueva Maya: maayah daahn giin ciich dzag

Vowel system

Yucatec Maya has five base vowels, each appearing in five forms:

Form	Pattern	Example	Meaning
Short	a	bak	bone
Long	aa	kaan	sky
Long high-tone	áa	gíin	sun
Glottal-stopped	ah	maayah	Maya
Long glottal	aah	oob (→ ooh)	plural suffix

Repository structure

nueva-maya/
├── README.md
├── orthography/
│   ├── alphabet.md
│   └── conversion-table.md
├── lessons/
│   └── lesson-01/
│       ├── README.md
│       └── vocabulary.md
└── tools/
    └── almg_to_nueva.py

Lessons

#	Title	Topics
01	Xok Yokhol Maayah Daahn	Greetings, thanks, family, pronouns

Design principles

1. Pure ASCII — every character has code point ≤127
2. Repurpose unused letters — f d g c do not exist in native Maya vocabulary
3. Full phonemic parity — one-to-one mapping with IPA, no information lost
4. Maximum backwards compatibility — only 6 characters change from ALMG
5. Automatable — lossless bidirectional conversion by script

Conversion tool

python tools/almg_to_nueva.py input.txt output.txt

Status

This is a proposed orthography — not yet officially recognized by INALI or ALMG. Community feedback from native Yucatec Maya speakers is actively sought.

Contributing

Pull requests welcome. Priority needs:

• Native speaker review of phonemic accuracy
• Lesson content (lessons 02+)
• Audio recordings for vocabulary
• Expanded conversion dictionary

References

• ALMG (1984). Unified alphabet for Mayan languages of Guatemala.
• Bricker, V. (1998). Dictionary of the Maya Language as Spoken in Hocabá.
• Burns, A. (1983). An Epoch of Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya.
• Na'atik Language & Culture Institute — naatikmexico.org

License

Content: CC BY-SA 4.0 Code: MIT