Holly Durkin

            The current language revitalization movement in Guatemala is largely in response to the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), during which 200,000 Maya were killed.   The Maya Movement began in the 1980s in an effort to revitalize and restore Maya culture. Revitalization of Mayan languages became a central issue of the movement, due to the fact that language tends to index cultural identity. Speaking Mayan languages instead of Spanish is a way for the Maya to reclaim their culture, as Spanish indexes the "colonial domination" experienced by the Maya for the past 500 years.
            Neologisms are developed for K’iche’ by the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, to promote Mayan language unity, rid Mayan Languages of Spanish borrowings, and create a “purer” form of K’iche’. Neologisms revitalize languages by giving speakers a word in their native language to utilize, as opposed to a foreign language borrowing.
            There are many morphological structure possibilities for K’iche’ neologisms. The focus of this analysis is neologisms formed as compounds, and compounds using the instrument/ locative b’al. There are regular, systematic forms of compounding in K’iche’. Neologisms are formed with systematic morphological structures, true to traditional K’iche’ language patterns. A few K’iche’ neologism examples will be demonstrated in the table below:

Neologism	Gloss	Literal Meaning	Structure
k’ol+b’al+ch’ich’	‘garage’	exist-place-car	V+LOC +N
k’as+ulew+ja	‘amphibian’	live- land- water	N+N+N
nik’+o+b’al+noj+wuj	‘library’	to investigate-place- ideas & books	V+EPE+LOC +N+N
ch’uq’+to+b’al q’ab’aj	“gloves”	cover- help-instrument-hand	V+V+INSTR+N

The analysis of K’iche’ neologism is relevant to language revitalization because Mayan languages were seen as inferior to Guatemala’s dominant Spanish for many years. Neologism development provides the Maya with lexicon needed to express modern and scientific thoughts, as well as lexical items that pertain to global matters.
One might expect that K’iche’ neologisms would be calques of Spanish expressions, and therefore wouldn’t always be very true to K’iche’ grammar. However, the opposite of this assumption is true. K’iche’ neologisms conform to structured morphological patterns, with grammar based on traditional K’iche’ language.