Yucatec Maya Phonology

A characteristic feature of Yucatec Maya, like other Mayan languages, is the use of ejective consonants: /pʼ/, /tʼ/, /kʼ/. Often referred to as glottalized consonants, they are produced at the same place of oral articulation as their non-ejective stop counterparts: /p/, /t/, /k/. However, the release of the lingual closure is preceded by a raising of the closed glottis to increase the air pressure in the space between the glottis and the point of closure, resulting in a release with a characteristic popping sound. The sounds are written using an apostrophe after the letter to distinguish them from the plain consonants (tʼàan "speech" vs. táan "forehead"). The apostrophes indicating the sounds were not common in written Maya until the 20th century but are now becoming more common. The Mayan b is also glottalized, an implosive /ɓ/, and is sometimes written bʼ, but that is becoming less common.

Yucatec Maya is one of only three Mayan languages to have developed tone, the others being Uspantek and one dialect of Tzotzil. Yucatec distinguishes short vowels and long vowels, indicated by single versus double letters (ii ee aa oo uu), and between high- and low-tone long vowels. High-tone vowels begin on a high pitch and fall in phrase-final position but rise elsewhere, sometimes without much vowel length. It is indicated in writing by an acute accent (íi ée áa óo úu). Low-tone vowels begin on a low pitch and are sustained in length; they are sometimes indicated in writing by a grave accent (ìi èe àa òo ùu).

Also, Yucatec has contrastive laryngealization (creaky voice) on long vowels, sometimes realized by means of a full intervocalic glottal stop and written as a long vowel with an apostrophe in the middle, as in the plural suffix -oʼob.

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m [m]	n [n]
Implosive		b [ɓ]
Plosive	plain	p [p]	t [t]		k  [k]	ʼ [ʔ]
	ejective	pʼ [pʼ]	tʼ [tʼ]		kʼ [kʼ]
Affricate	plain		tz [ts]	ch [tʃ]
	ejective		tzʼ [tsʼ]	chʼ [tʃʼ]
Fricative			s [s]	x [ʃ]	j [x]	h [h]
Approximant		w [w~v]†	l [l]	y [j]
Flap			r  [ɾ]

† the letter w may represent the sounds [w] or [v]. The sounds are interchangeable in Yucatec Mayan although /w/ is considered the proper sound.

Some sources describe the plain consonants as aspirated, but Victoria Bricker states "[s]tops that are not glottalized are articulated with lung air without aspiration as in English spill, skill, still."^[10]

Vowels

In terms of vowel quality, Yucatec Maya has a straight-forward five vowel system:

	Front	Back
Close	i	u
Mid	e	o
Open	a

For each of these five vowel qualities, the language contrasts four distinct vowel "shapes", i.e. combinations of vowel length, tone, and phonation. In the standard orthography first adopted in 1984,^[11] vowel length is indicated by digraphs (e.g. "aa" for IPA [aː]).

Short, neutral tone	Long, low tone	Long, high tone	Creaky voiced ('glottalized, rearticulated'), long, high tone
pik 'eight thousand' [pik]	miis 'cat' [mìːs]	míis [míːs] 'broom; to sweep'	niʼichʼ [nḭ́ːtʃʼ] 'to get bitten'

In fast-paced speech, the glottalized long vowels may be pronounced the same as the plain long high vowels, so in such contexts ka’an [ká̰ːn] 'sky' sounds the same as káan [káːn]'when?'.

Stress

Mayan words are typically stressed on the earliest syllable with a long vowel. If there is no long vowel, then the last syllable is stressed. Borrowings from other languages such as Spanish or Nahuatl are often stressed as in the original languages.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucatec_Maya_language