More than Mistakes: Grammatical Errors and Sociolinguistic Identity in a Colonial-Era K'iche' Maya Manuscript

Abstract

Research on documents composed by Maya communities during the mid-sixteenth to seventeenth centuries has been largely limited to basic transcriptions, translations, and ethnohistorical analysis, particularly for those whose textual contents are political in nature. This analysis focuses instead on grammatical errors in a Spanish-language título from the K'iche' Maya region of the western Guatemalan Highlands. I argue that the patterned gender and number disagreement indicates that the scribe was a native K'iche' speaker who was not fully bilingual in Spanish. This case study illustrates the sociolinguistic potential of colonial-era indigenous sources when examined from a paleographic and linguistic perspective.