It was spoken in Belize and Guatemala prior to its extinction in the late eighteenth century.

It and its sister Chʼortiʼ language are now deemed likely (or the likeliest) descendants of Classic Mayan, the language represented in Mayan hieroglyphic writing.

[3][nb 1] The later Spanish conquest of Peten would bring about the extinction of the language in the late eighteenth century, making Ch’olti’ one of only two Mayan languages not extant as of 2017.

[4] The colonial variant of Ch’olti’ is known only from an ethnolinguistic manuscript by Francisco Morán, a Dominican friar who drafted the text during his entradas to the former Manche Ch’ol Territory between 1685 and 1695.

[5][nb 2] Recently, Ch’olti’ has become of particular interest to the epigraphic study of Mayan hieroglyphs, since it seems certain that most of the glyphic texts are written in an ancestral form of one or more of the Ch’olan languages.