Yucatec Maya (
Yukatek Maya in the revised
orthography of the
Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala), called
Màaya t'àan (lit. "Maya speech") by its speakers, is a
Mayan language spoken in the
Yucatán Peninsula and northern
Belize. Maya is the only one of the approximately 32 languages of the Mayan language family that has the proper name Maya. To native speakers, the proper name is Maya and it is known only as Maya. The qualifier "Yucatec" is a tag linguists use to distinguish it from other Mayan languages (such as
K'iche' and
Itza' Maya). Thus, the use of term Yucatec Maya to refer to the language is a scientific jargon or nomenclature; its use is equivalent to persons referring to English as Germanic.