With over a million speakers (some 7% of Guatemala's population), Kʼicheʼ is the second most widely-spoken language in the country, after Spanish.

Unstressed vowels are frequently reduced (to [ɨ] or [ə]) or elided altogether, which often produces consonant clusters even word-initially.

[5] In West Quiche, the approximants /l/, /r/, /j/, and /w/ devoice and fricate to [ɬ], [r̥], [ç], and [ʍ] word-finally and often before voiceless consonants.

In the dialect of Santa María Chiquimula, intervocalic /l/ alternates between [l] and [ð], a highly unusual sound change.

[7] Complex onsets are very common in Kʼicheʼ, partially because of the active process of penultimate syncope.

The ethnohistorian and Mayanist Dennis Tedlock uses his own transliteration system, which is completely different from any of the established orthographies.

[8] "Set A" markers are used on nouns to mark possessor agreement and on verbs to agree with the transitive subject (ergative case).

"Set B" markers are used on verbs to agree with the transitive object or the intransitive subject (absolutive case).

Kʼicheʼ also has two second person formal agreement markers: la (singular) and alaq (plural).

Kʼicheʼ has two formal second person pronouns: lal (singular) and alaq (plural).

Kʼicheʼ verbs are morphologically complex and can take numerous prefixes and suffixes, which serve both inflectional and derivational purposes.

As with all other Mayan languages, Kʼicheʼ has an ergative pattern of verb agreement and often uses verb-object-subject (VOS) word order.

Subjects of intransitive verbs can be extracted without adding the Focus Antipassive: jachi:nwhox-0-pe:t-ikCOM-ABS.3.SG-come-ST.INTRjachi:n x-0-pe:t-ikwho COM-ABS.3.SG-come-ST.INTR"Who came?

"AA:Absolutive Antipassive ABS:Absolutive Agreement ERG:Ergative Agreement PA:Passive CA:Causative CP:Completive Passive FA:Focus Antipassive INC:Incompletive Aspect COM:Completive Aspect NOM:Nominalization ST:Status:Kʼicheʼ language#Verb status Contrary to how many other languages use high pitch in child directed speech (babytalk), Kʼicheʼ babytalk has been shown not to use high pitch.

Kʼicheʼ children begin producing ejective consonants after they are three years old (Pye, Ingram and List 1987).

The children’s utterances with the existential verb k’o:lik ("it exists") illustrate their status suffix expertise.

For the most part, Kʼicheʼ children produce the phrase-medial and phrase-final forms of the existential verb in their appropriate contexts.

They frequently produce the final, stressed syllable /lik/ of the existential in phrase-final contexts, omitting the root entirely (Pye 1991).

This distinction is a core feature of Kʼicheʼ grammar, and underpins the ergative morphology on the verbs and nouns.

The semantic diversity of the verbs and positionals overturns the hypothesis that children use prototypical activity scenes as a basis for constructing grammatical categories.

Although three-year-old Kʼicheʼ speakers produce the ergative and absolutive person markers on verbs in 50 percent or less of their obligatory contexts, they do not use the ergative markers on intransitive verbs or vice versa (Pye 1990, 1991).

The Kʼicheʼ children’s use of status suffixes shows that two-year-olds are capable of using semantically abstract affixes appropriately.

This morphology accounts for the language-specific look of the children’s early utterances and guides its development in later stages.