[2] Itzaʼ was the language of administration across much of the Yucatán Peninsula during the supremacy of Chichen Itza.
[3] During this time, the Itza people resettled their ancestral home in the Petén Basin.
The modern Itza people are the last of the Lowland Maya to be able to directly trace their heritage back to the pre-Columbian era.
[5] Additionally, Itzaʼ possesses a rich vocabulary for crops and animals that encodes specific information about different varietals and individuals of the species.
The late 1980s brought an increase in interest among Maya people, including the Itzá, in preserving their cultural heritage.
[2] The following chart shows the consonant phonemes of Itza:[7] Where the orthography differs from the IPA notation, the orthography used by the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala is noted in brackets.
Possessives, demonstratives, and relative clauses all typically follow the words they modify; adjectives can also occur in this position.
Itza has specific words to encode various properties of different varietals and individuals within a species.
[5] Additionally, agricultural terms in Itzaʼ have been virtually uninfluenced by contact with the Spanish, allowing some insight into the commonplace vocabulary of pre-contact Itza.
Words and linguistic constructions are often repeated throughout a sentence order to draw emphasis to what is being spoken.
[13] The categories tense, aspect, and mood are interwoven in Itzaj Maya verbal and adverbial morphosyntax.